Influence on the fatigue behavior of additively manufactured aluminum structures

Abstract The development of additively manufactured structures and products should preferably be performed in a virtual environment from the first sketch to the printed component. In order to get a high quality product that can be used as safety relevant component under cyclic loading, the fatigue assessment including the structure optimization with respect to the exploitation of the lightweight design potential requires suitable numerical approaches. Therefore, the local component-related material behavior has to be determined and considered. During the AM process multiple influences on the cyclic material behavior, caused for instance by the exposure lighting strategy or surface conditions, lead to mutual interactions between the load and built orientation on the fatigue properties. Caused by industrial needs for short development cycles and reduced numerical effort, the requirements on a digital twin for the fatigue assessment are growing and only satisfying with an adjusted numerical concept with optimized material parameters. In this work, the influences of the manufacturing process on the cyclic stress-strain behavior as well as on the fatigue life will be discussed. Therefore, load- and strain-controlled fatigue test were performed and the results are summarized in order to establish a better understanding on the fatigue behavior of additively manufactured components and parts.