Dynamical fatigue behavior of additive manufactured products for a fundamental life cycle approach

Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes are increasingly integrated into today's value added chains and are prospectively used for batch production. Due to the fact that conventional manufacturing technologies feature design and machining restrictions AM processes offer a nearly restriction free design freedom. This fact could be an answer to the permanent increase in demands of today's products. However, additive manufactured parts suffer from bad surface quality and the material properties concerning fatigue life are still an objective of current investigations. As a first step to describe the Life Cycle of additive manufactured parts fundamental knowledge about the dynamical fatigue behavior in operation has to be obtained. In comparison to conventional machined products this knowledge is not available to this extent for additive manufactured products. It is crucial to ensure that AM parts have a comparable or better high cycle fatigue (HCF) behavior compared to conventional machined parts for the potential future use as dynamical loaded parts in the aviation industry and medical technology such as turbine blades or implants. We investigate additive manufactured parts concerning the HCF behavior and surface quality. The parts are machined with Selective Laser Melting and then investigated concerning surface roughness and fatigue life. Also different finishing processes after the AM process are investigated in order to find out how different process chains influence the HCF behavior of additive manufactured parts. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.