Enhancing mechanical properties of wire + arc additively manufactured INCONEL 718 superalloy through in-process thermomechanical processing

Wire + arc additive manufacture (WAAM) was applied to produce INCONEL 718 superalloy (IN718) components in a layer by layer manner; further, interpass cold rolling was introduced to generate in-process thermomechanical processing effect during the deposition process. Mechanical testing showed that with rolling applied, the strength of the solution plus aging treated WAAM IN718 was improved from 1056 MPa (unrolled) to 1351 MPa (rolled) which met the wrought standard (1276 MPa), and the material anisotropy was eliminated. The unrolled IN718 featured large columnar grains developing along the building direction, with the length and width as large as 11 mm and 0.8 mm respectively; rolling induced plastic deformation triggered a non-uniform recrystallization upon successive depositions, which produced a recrystallized core with small columnar grains and numerous finely equiaxed grains with the grain size of 12.7 μm. The overall strengthening produced by interpass rolling was attributed mostly (76%) to the rolling induced recrystallization which produced grain size reduction strengthening and created larger grain boundary area to allow more precipitation at the grain boundaries, and partially (24%) due to the improved aging response of the recrystallized grain structur

Comparison of process control methods for wire-arc directed energy deposition of low carbon steels with in-situ temperature measurement

Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques enable the production of near-net shape parts. Wire-arc direct energy deposition (WA-DED) can achieve a higher deposition rate among other available metal AM methods. Conventional arc welding requires a maximum interpass temperature to limit any reduction in mechanical properties, but this may not be practicable for wWA-DED. In this study, two interpass process control methods, one with maximum interpass surface temperature and the other with constant dwell time, were adopted to deposit low alloyed steel walls while maintaining the same feedstock and heat input values. Thermocouples were inserted at three different positions in the walls during deposition, to record the thermal profiles. Test samples extracted from walls exhibited similar tensile strength (~10 MPa difference) and hardness values. Microstructural evaluation showed the presence of interlayer regions with alternating coarse and fine bands of ferrite grains, irrespective of the interpass control method. These findings suggest that dwell time control is better for productivity.Mechanical Engineerin

Study of residual stress and microstructural evolution in as-deposited and inter-pass rolled wire plus arc additively manufactured Inconel 718 alloy after ageing treatment

The manufacture of structural components made from nickel-based super alloys would benefit from the commercial advantages of Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM), as it is commonly expensive to process using other conventional techniques. The two major challenges of WAAM are process residual stress and undesired microstructure. Residual stress causes part distortion and build failures, while the as-deposited microstructure does not allow the common heat-treatment to be effective in achieving the desired mechanical properties. This paper focuses on understanding the microstructural features, phase formation and three-dimensional residual stress state variation in as-deposited and inter-pass rolled conditions and after solutionising, quenching and ageing. The thermal history from successive deposition and cold working were correlated to the phase formation and macro residual stress formation and subsequent evolution. The {311} family of crystallographic planes were used as atomic strain gauge to determine the macrostrain and analysis of three dimensional stress state in different processing conditions. The measured strain were corrected for the compositional variation by measuring EDM machined d0 specimens manufactured under similar processing conditions. While the as-deposited part show significant stress redistribution and distortion after removal from the main fixture, inter-pass rolling was found to reduce part distortion significantly, the residual stress profile after inter-pass rolling showed highest tensile magnitude near the substrate while near the top of the deposit it was compressive as can be expected from the rolling process. The other two beneficial effects of inter-pass rolling on the microstructure are mitigation of the formation of undesired Laves-phase, thereby improving the response to solution treatment and aging together with significantly reduced grain size and texture. The application of inter-pass rolling reduces the potential part complexity, which however does not prevent the manufacture of common candidate parts, which are typically 1-to-1 replacements of forged, cast or machined from soli

Effect of crack-like defects on the fracture behaviour of Wire + Arc additively manufactured nickel-base Alloy 718

The fabrication of large components using a high deposition rate, near-net shape process like Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) is a promising option for many industries, due to the potential for reduction in material wastage and shorter lead times in comparison to conventional methods. Specialist materials like nickel-base superalloys, which are typically used in high temperature and corrosive environments, are particularly attractive options due to their high raw material costs. Although nickel-base Alloy 718 seems well suited to the process due to its good weldability, process-induced defects can arise from unfavourable deposition conditions and elimination of these defects may not always be possible. In WAAM Alloy 718 deposited under such conditions, crack-like defects with planar morphology and hot cracking characteristics were observed. These defects were observable using conventional non-destructive testing techniques and displayed directionality relating to the deposition path. The fracture behaviour of WAAM Alloy 718 containing these defects was “semi-stable” – a mixture of fracture instability and stable crack extension. The apparent fracture toughness of WAAM Alloy 718 containing these defects was found to be anisotropic, which can be attributed to the interaction of the notched crack with pre-existing defects. WAAM Alloy 718 displayed an apparent fracture toughness comparable to that of wrought Alloy 718 when notched perpendicular to the defects; but only half that of wrought when notched parallel to the defects. Therefore, careful consideration of defect orientation and their effects on mechanical properties is important in assessing the fitness-for-service of WAAM Alloy 71

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe