Metal additive manufacturing (AM) has major potential applications across industry. However, a better understanding of its compositional and microstructural variability of manufactured parts is required for AM to be more widely adopted. In this article (Scientific Reports – Nature), the authors used a Ni-Ti alloy as a sensory material to quantitatively, and rather rapidly, observe compositional and/or microstructural variability in selective laser melting manufactured parts.
Their findings provide an important first step towards understanding the nature of variability in additive manufacturing parts. The TEM specimens used in this research were prepared with the TESCAN LYRA3 Ga focused ion beam scanning electron microscope using the standard lift-out method and thinned to electron-transparency at low ion beam energies.