Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing of High-Performance Steel Components

This is a Sheffield Branch event organised and run by our Sheffield Branch for its members. Other members and non-members are welcome to join us. The talk will be followed by our Branch AGM.

Overview: Wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is a metal 3D printing technique that involves the layer-by-layer deposition of melted wire.  It’s essentially an extension of multi-pass welding, but with the weld metal making up the entirety of the component, and is performed using robots to carefully control the deposition conditions. It operates on a larger scale that other metal AM techniques (e.g., powder AM), as it can produce parts that are metres in size.  WAAM potential to produce medium-large scale parts for many engineering sectors, including aerospace, power generation, and defence.  Its adoption is likely to be especially beneficial for applications in which we waste a lot of material during conventional manufacturing (e.g., by machining away most of a forging to produce a complex shape). 

A key metallurgical challenge to the adoption of WAAM is that the microstructures of parts in the as-built state can be heterogeneous (like in multi-pass welds), which is not ideal for engineering applications.  This talk will provide an introduction to WAAM, its advantages and disadvantages, and will explore the metallurgical phenomena at work during WAAM of steel, and how we might control some of them.

Speaker Biography: Dr Ed Pickering is Reader in Metallurgy at the Department of Materials, University of Manchester, and a Research Area Lead for the Advanced Metals Processing theme of the Henry Royce Institute. His main research interests lie in the characterisation of phase transformations and processing-microstructure-property relationships in steels, and the alloy design of high-entropy alloys and refractory alloys.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD): Attending this event supports your professional development.  You can claim 2 CPD points per hour for this event.  As a member of the Welding Institute you can record your CPD activity online from your membership portal.

Additional Information:

• Sandwich Buffet served from 17:30
• Registration for this event will close 48 hours before the start.
• Live event only
• Registration details maybe shared with our Branch volunteers to help run the event.