GKN Additive has successfully adapted a DP600-like low alloy dual-phase steel material for additive manufacturing.

It is bringing to market two versions of the material – Dual Phase Low Alloy (DPLA) and Free Sintering Low Alloy (FSLA), which exhibit similar mechanical properties to DP600 and can be used with laser powder bed fusion and binder jetting technologies respectively. The company believes this development will help to enable diverse designs and applications in the automotive sector, among other industrial markets.

Available for purchase immediately, GKN Additive says the DPLA and FSLA materials have similar ultimate tensile strength and low yield strength to UTS ratio of DP600, while their spreadability, laser absorption (DPLA) and sinterability (FSLA) have been specialised for additive manufacturing. According to the company, the mechanical properties of the materials can be tuned more widely by heat treatment, which will help to make them suitable for a ‘wide spectrum of customers.’ Previously, GKN Additive would spend time developing and qualifying new materials according to the desired characteristics of customers, but the ‘predefined wide property field’ of the DLPA and FSLA materials will mean less of that.

By using the materials, GKN Additive expects users of powder bed fusion and binder jetting to be able to achieve a ‘new level of design freedom’, reduce the weight of components and reduce the time it takes to enter functional validation for a new product.

“With these AM processes, manufacturers in the automotive industry can construct body parts differently than what was possible with traditional sheet metal parts. If you look at a tailored blank, many sheet-metal parts and support parts need to be formed and joined together to achieve a certain stiffness,” commented Christopher Schaak, Technology Manager for Binder Jetting at GKN Additive. “By using structural components printed with AM on the other hand, you would need less process steps and less material, leading to cost optimisation and a weight reduction.”

“Our customers want to know what the new AM material can achieve in their respective use case and how it can be used,” added Sebastian Bluemer, Technology Manager for Laser AM at GKN Additive. “It’s faster to print parts with AM than to retool complete traditional production lines and manufacture the parts the conventional way. This means that AM is a good solution to quickly and functionally validate a material and a component, and to analyse faster and more efficiently, whether the material can help with a specific application or not.”

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