A review of wire arc additive manufacturing and advances in wire arc additive manufacturing of aluminium

ABSTRACT

Although wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) has proven its capability of fulfilling demands of production of medium-to-large-scale components for automotive and allied sectors made up of aluminium, at present, WAAM cannot be applied as a fully fledged manufacturing process because of practical challenges such as under-matched mechanical properties, the presence of large residual stresses and mandatory post-deposition operation for the formed component. This paper is a review of WAAM technology including a brief of WAAM history, status, advantages and constraints of the WAAM field. A focus is provided including the efforts directed towards the reduction of porosity, tensile properties, microstructural investigations and other valuable advancements in the field of WAAM of aluminium.

This review was submitted as part of the 2018 Materials Literature Review Prize of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining run by the Editorial Board of MST. Sponsorship of the prize by TWI Ltd is gratefully acknowledged.

KEYWORDS:

• Aluminium
• CMT
• history
• interlayer-rolling
• microstructure
• porosity
• WAAM

Acknowledgements

This publication was made possible by the sponsorship and support of Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The present work was enabled through, and undertaken at, the National Structural Integrity Research Centre (NSIRC), a postgraduate engineering facility for industry-led research into structural integrity establishment and managed by TWI through a network of both national and international Universities. The present review is the author’s own work. The author would like to acknowledge the support from Geoff Melton, Prof. Jonathan Lawrence, Sameehan Joshi, Prof. Steven Jones and Adrian Addison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coventry University [grant number 7477993]; Lloyd’s Register Foundation [grant number KD022017COV]; National Structural Integrity Research Centre [grant number KD022017COV].