Ryan T. Ott¹, Fanqiang Meng¹, Emrah Simsek¹, Ikenna Nlededim¹, Matthew Kramer¹; ¹Ames Laboratory/Cmi

Functional materials (e.g., permanent magnets, magnetocalorics, elastocalorics, etc.) are increasingly important in numerous technologies including clean energy. Developing new functional materials, however, requires minimizing critical materials usage and maximizing compatibility with advanced processing methods. Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers the potential to both accelerate alloy development as well as integrate the materials into complex geometries and architectures. Here we discuss using directed energy deposition AM to synthesize different functional materials. This includes accelerated alloy development for rapidly identifying optimal compositions for bulk processing to the actual AM synthesis of components with tailored structure and properties. The opportunities and challenges associated with AM synthesis of functional materials are discussed.