Rapid thermal excursions (e.g. 10^6 K/s) and repeated cycling across solid-liquid and solid-solid phase transformations are common in metal additive manufacturing processes.  The consequences of these process characteristics on microstructure evolution and material performance are poorly understood, and with conventional alloys these unique processing attributes are often viewed as a hindrance rather than for their potential benefits.  Ongoing efforts seek to understand the implications of these details and ultimately design and test novel processing pathways and material compositions in order to realize performance improvements.  Essential to this is development of tools and methods for rapidly assessing and optimizing processing pathways, in concert with experimental efforts for validation; AFRL is currently seeking candidates with skills and novel research concepts relevant to these research areas.

M.A. Groeber, E. Schwalbach, S. Donegan, K. Chaput, T. Butler, J. Miller.  “Application of characterization, modelling, and analytics towards understanding process-structure linkages in metallic 3D printing”.  IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. 219 (1) 012002. 2017.  http://stacks.iop.org/1757-899X/219/i=1/a=012002

key words

Additive manufacturing; Microstructure evolution; Material characterization; Material modeling; Kinetics; Thermodynamics; Integrated computational materials science and engineering (ICMSE); Metals processing;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants