| Abstract Scope |
The growing relevance of Additive Manufacturing (AM) of metals drives the need to redesign alloys and develop new ones that are well-suited for AM. However, this endeavor has faced the lack of adequate materials processability and performance models that can be implemented as part of the high throughput ICME-driven materials exploration, design, and optimization. Today's impossibility of adequately predicting printability based on chemical composition has become a bottleneck for alloy design. One of the significant challenges for AM of metals is the potential susceptibility to solidification cracking. The solidification cracking susceptibility criteria that have been proposed over the last +70 years and that are applicable to alloy design endeavors can produce unreliable results. In addition, it is well known that such criteria or models only work correctly within specific alloy systems. The use of more sophisticated and physics-based models, such as the ones proposed by Prof. J. Duppont, is hindered in some cases by the lack of appropriate data required for their application. Therefore, building on the shoulders of welding metallurgy giants such as Prof. Duppont, a computationally inexpensive, composition-based approach to evaluate the solidification cracking susceptibility of a wide range of alloys has been developed, and its outstanding performance has been verified. The model links CALPHAD-based calculations and fluid dynamics to provide a fast, efficient, and composition-agnostic evaluation tool for solidification cracking. The model addresses the key solidification process of liquid flow along interdendritic regions to prevent crack formation and/or back-fill incipient solidification cracks. The calculated solidification cracking susceptibility indexes have been compared with experimental solidification cracking data, showing outstanding accuracy. The methodology capability to rank the solidification cracking susceptibility of similar alloys based on composition provides a revolutionary new tool to aid ICME-driven alloy design and development, which already supports materials casting, welding, and additive manufacturing. |