An article authored by Thorsten Becker of M&M and co-authors Punit Kumar and Upadrasta Ramamurty has recently published in the prestigious Acta Materialia journal.
Thorsten Becker is an Associate Professor Extraordinary in our department and was a member of our staff until he recently took up a position at UCT. He represented the Materials research group at M&M Engineering. Punit Kumar is from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Upadrasta Ramamurty is from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore.

Titled: "Fracture and fatigue in additively manufactured metals", here is a short overview of the article:

Additive manufacturing (AM) of metallic components offers many advantages over conventional manufacturing methods, notably design freedom at little material waste. There is significant current interest in the manufacturing aspects of a wide variety of structural alloys. Concomitantly, establishing the processing – microstructure – mechanical performance relations, in conjunction with the attributes such as flaws, residual stresses, and mesostructures inherent to the AM processes, is critical for the widespread adoption of structural metallic components made using AM.

The article covers the current understanding of the structure-property correlations in AM alloys. Unique aspects of the microstructures of the AM alloys, process-related attributes, and their effect on the tensile, fracture, fatigue crack growth, and unnotched fatigue properties are highlighted. The emphasis is on the interplay between the microstructures and process attributes in determining the structural integrity of AM alloys in terms of properties such as near-threshold fatigue crack growth rate, fracture toughness, and fatigue strength.

The article can be viewed here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359645421006200