This chapter is going to give up-to-date overview of development in the field of additive manufacturing (AM) of metallic components. There will be briefly mentioned input materials and specific requirement for the input materials (powders and wires). General technology process overview will be presented here, and selective laser melting (SLM) technology and beam melting technologies will be described. Advantages of 3D printing technology will be explained in terms of special designs; special properties and generally multifunctional components of production possibilities will be shown. Postprinting procedures leading to improvement of mechanical properties of printed components like thermal or thermomechanical treatment will also be mentioned here.
Part of the book: Powder Metallurgy
Fracture mechanics has been used for decades nowadays, and methods have been well established in the community especially for standard-sized specimens. As it was mainly developed for large structure assessment against the brittle failure, standardized specimens are of large size at present. However, in many cases, these standard specimens are not possible to apply due to size requirements of the available experimental material or the size of the component considered. These can be cases of residual service life assessment of in-service components, local properties determination (e.g., across weld), anisotropy determination and assessment of mechanical properties of newly developed materials under laboratory conditions (e.g., SPD processed materials, etc.). Therefore, development of new methods using significantly smaller specimens has to be carried out, and procedures using smaller-sized specimens together with their validity limits and relation to standardly obtained results have to be provided in order to provide solution for wide applications.
Part of the book: Contact and Fracture Mechanics