Investigations of precipitation and mechnical properties in an aluminum alloy elaborated by metal additive manufacturing

In metal additive manufacturing, the large thermal anisotropy, which takes place during the deposition and the melting of the metallic powder, leads to anisotropic grain microstructures and highly heterogeneous precipitagtion. The knowledge of thermal, physical and metallurgical phenomena developing from the nanometric to the mesoscopic scale is essential to understand and model the behavior of these new class of materials, to develop alloy composition adapted to the thermal and mechanical loadings of components during service. In this study, the Laue microdiffraction technique is used to investigate the crystallography, the chemistry and the strain hardening in an aeronautical aluminum model alloy elaborated by selective laser melting.