Numerical tools to investigate mechanical and fatigue properties of additively manufactured MS1-H13 hybrid steels

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been recently used to deposit metal powder on top of conventional metals. Of particular interest is hybrid additively manufactured steels which were found to be a suitable solution to benefit from features of each metal at different spots of a mechanical component. Due to its superior mechanical characteristics, maraging steel (MS1) has recently attracted tremendous attention for additive manufacturing applications mainly in aerospace, tool and die, and marine industries or to be 3D printed on top of other metals as a hybrid product using different techniques such as Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). In this paper a predictive finite element (FE) model and a combined analytical-numerical framework were developed to evaluate the mechanical performance of hybrid additively manufactured components and facilitate the prediction of hardness and fatigue life of these parts. The proposed tools were employed in two scopes: First to simulate the indentation hardness test of hybrid DMLS-MS1-H13 steels; and second to calculate fatigue crack nucleation life of maraging steel including defects (i.e. welding residual stresses). Parameters such as local and global displacements, changes in Young's modulus, and hardness, high cycle fatigue life, welding temperature distribution, and residual stress were investigated. The hardness experiments were carried out to improve the reported data found in similar studies, which were used as the main resource to validate the proposed numerical framework. The capabilities of the presented frameworks enable this work to target existing ambiguities in additively manufactured mechanical components.