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Metallurgy

Printing steels

Nature Materials volume 17, pages 13–14 (2018)Cite this article

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Additive manufacturing has been used to fabricate a common stainless steel, which imparts a unique microstructure to this material, making it stronger and more ductile than that produced with conventional methods.

It is almost a quarter of a century since the early pioneers of metal 3D printing — also called additive manufacturing (AM) — started to convert polymer sintering machines to enable the creation of metal prototypes in industrially relevant alloys1. Interest in this technology, although slow at first, has recently gathered pace, as the potential manufacturing advantages that the process affords — for example, in reduced part count, design freedom and lower process waste — have become clear2, to the point where 3D printing of metals is now seen as a possible disruptive technology for the manufacture of complex engineering components across a wide range of industries. However, barriers to adoption remain, with the poor performance of industrially important alloys in 3D printing ranking high among them3.

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Figure 1: Complex hierarchically heterogeneous microstructure of 316L stainless steel produced by a laser powder-bed-fusion (L-PBF) technique.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK

    Iain Todd

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  1. Iain Todd
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Correspondence to Iain Todd.

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Todd, I. Printing steels. Nature Mater 17, 13–14 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat5042

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