1. Project Report 1 (30%) – Due Week 7 (9am, Friday, 1st May 2020)
Background
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing, a process of creating a 3D object by adding materials layer by layer, continues to make deep inroads into the manufacturing sector. However, the lack of performance consistency of additively manufactured metal parts due to microstructural inconsistency precludes its wider application, especially to those that require reliable and repeatable mechanical properties. Building an ability to create reliable parts on a consistent basis will assure quality metal AM production of mission-critical components for use in the most demanding industries such as aerospace, defence and healthcare.
Purpose of Assessment
You are a manufacturing engineer at Digital Factory working on AM of metallic components for automotive and aerospace applications. Recently, one client has approached you for suggestions on the feasibility of manufacturing components used in jet turbine engine (Figure 1) and automotive engine (Figure 2) by additive manufacturing. The components in consideration for AM are: fan case, fan blade, low pressure turbine blade, high pressure turbine blade, shaft for the jet turbine engine; intake manifold, exhaust manifold, connecting rod, cylinder block for the automotive engine. Metallic materials available to you for AM include Ti-6Al-4V, AlSi10Mg, Inconel 718, 316L stainless steel and 17-4PH stainless steel.
Considering working environment and performance requirement, you are required in this project to 1) select one of the aforementioned components of your interest; 2) select and evaluate an appropriate metal for the manufacture of this component using selective laser melting (SLM) or laser engineered net shaping (LENS); 3) justify the feasibility of manufacturing the component with required performance.You will be provided one SLM- or LENS-fabricated sample for microstructure analysis and Vicker’s microhardness measurement and one SLM- or LENS-fabricated dog-bone specimen (either vertically or horizontally built) for tensile testing. These analyses and testing will be performed by you in the Materials Lab under the supervision of an experienced technical specialist.(Note: owing to the lab closure and cancellation of pracs, experimental data needed for Project Report 1 will be acquired by Lab Technical Staff and then uploaded to the Unit Site. With these data and information from the literature, you will perform your own analysis and prepare your Project Report 1)
This project aims to develop a comprehensive and critical understanding of existing issues confronting the metal AM community for a specific metallic alloy that has been made by AM techniques. With the results produced in this project and your own literature review, a project report of approximately 2000 words (excluding abstract & references) with up to 8 figures and 2 tables will be developed by demonstrating in-depth understanding of the metal AM process, theory/literature, experimental results and the process-microstructure-property relationship. Upon your critical analysis, you are required to justify:
- Whether the selected metallic material can be used to fabricate the selected engine component with necessary mechanical performance using SLM or LENS
- If it is not feasible, what are the main issues? It is more desirable to provide possible solutions.
This project report is worth 30% of the total mark for this unit. With the initial support of several review/overview journal articles, you will be required to create your own project report topic, conduct a comprehensive literature search/review, evaluate and analyse the experimental results, and write a report in a professional manner including:
- Appropriate section headings and document layout
- Appropriate referencing in IEEE format
- Captions for all figures and tables used
- Consistent professional document style (e.g. same size font, bold titles)
- Correct use of formal and academic language
- The use of spelling checker/grammatical checker
- Valid signed/named/dated SEBE Assignment Coversheet
Figure 1 Jet turbine engine (from Rolls Royce)
Figure 2 Volvo four-stroke cycle petrol engine (from The Science and Technology of Materials in Automotive Engines, 2005)
Project Report Format
The project report should use the format below as well as an appropriate referencing in IEEE format and should conform to the University plagiarism policy.
- Project title
- Abstract (up to 150 words)
- Literature review
- Research problem statement
- Methodology and experimental
- Results and discussion
- Feasibility and justification
- Conclusions
- References