Laser Powder Bed Fusion AM Work by VEXTEC and Lockheed

Collaborative work between VEXTEC and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics on Additive Manufacturing (AM) has recently been presented at two high-profile aerospace conferences. The work focused on Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) additive techniques for AlSi10Mg and Ti-6Al-4V alloys. VEXTEC’s computational VPS-MICRO® product reliability software predicted the fatigue performance of LPBF coupons, and simulation results compared favorably to Lockheed Martin experimental testing.

The work emphasized the fact that metal additive manufacturing techniques produce material microstructures that have such wide variation in properties that they cannot be appropriately modeled by deterministic approaches. Instead, they must be represented probabilistically in order to effectively characterize the nature of AM-processed materials. VPS-MICRO accounts for this variability using probabilistic material models and computationally-efficient simulation.

For more information on these presentations and published proceedings, see the links below:

Aircraft Structural Integrity Program (ASIP) Conference, Dec. 2021: “Fatigue Analysis of Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) Ti-6Al-4V”