Soumya Nag¹, Neil Johnson¹, Lee Kerwin², Yiming Zhang¹, Sathyanarayanan Raghavan¹, Sreekar Karnati¹, Eric MacDonald³, Alex Kitt², Changjie Sun¹, Genghis Khan¹, Chris Williams⁴, Thomas Broderick⁵, Mark Benedict⁵, Dave Siddle⁶; ¹GE Research, ²EWI - Buffalo Manufacturing Works, ³Youngstown State University, ⁴GE Aviation, ⁵Air Force Research Laboratory, ⁶America Makes

Additive manufacturing modalities aligned with the AM Genome initiative are used to rapidly generate custom-designed builds for expedited processing-structure-property evaluation, also allowing for build flexibility and customization of parts. However, AM parts have to go through long iterative evaluation cycles, which greatly increases the time and cost of substantiating the process and component.In the current study, material system of choice is Ti64 – the workhorse alloy for structural aerospace and biomedical applications. Powder blown Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technique was employed to build common features that are critical for part performance. Build parameter DOEs were conducted to determine defect density and microstructural descriptors, and in turn relate them to material property values. Armed with this information, physics based predictive models were generated to develop response surfaces. Developing and validating such feature-based build qualification (FBQ) catalogues is a big step towards improving the process qualification of DED components.