Study on the key technology of additive manufacture for aluminium alloy

Researcher: Miss Yuehan Liu

Supervisor: Dr Jun Jiang

Summary

The demand of producing cost-effective and geometrically complex structures with good mechanical properties is driving the development of newly proposed processing technique additive manufacturing (AM) for high-strength metal. Due to the feasibility of building structures with minimal material wasting, AM recently attracts the interest of researchers and dramatically leads to industrial revolution. For aluminium, there are only limited aluminium alloys can be processed by AM and AMed parts produce poor mechanical performance compared to wrought structures. The overall objective of this project is to increase mechanical properties for example strength, hardness and ductility, quality and accuracy of AMed aluminium parts by AM combing with hot forging parts and meanwhile, an integrated AM and hot-forging machine will be developed to control the micro-forging variables.