Case Studies

Innovation in advanced manufacturing is transforming the way in which we produce products across a range of industrial settings. But in order to achieve this potential, researchers need fast, reliable strategies for material characterisation, process optimisation, and quality control.

From aircraft engines and hot gas pipelines to power station cladding, metallic materials are widely used in high-temperature applications. Understanding mechanical properties at these elevated temperatures is crucial for optimising part performance, ensuring integrity in safety-critical applications and predicting part lifetime under these extreme conditions.

In collaboration with Alloyed, we explore how mechanical properties differ across sections of an additively manufactured part and discover how testing directly on a part ensures that AM designs will deliver performance that users can rely on.

Testing materials under the conditions they’re likely to experience in service is vital to understand both performance and lifetime. For many components, this involves exposure to high temperatures, whether that’s in an aerospace engine or a large-scale bakery oven. Traditionally, high-temperature tensile testing has been the gold standard for assessing mechanical properties in such conditions. However, this method demands highly specific testing samples, leading to significant costs, operational complexity, and in some cases, making high-temperature testing impractical or even unfeasible.

In this case study with Renishaw, we uncover how the varying temperatures throughout a furnace have a significant impact on the mechanical properties of AM parts, in this case showing over 10% variation in yield strength, and how these findings have led Renishaw to optimise their heat treatment process, ensuring consistency and increasing confidence in part performance.

Where machining tensile specimens for testing is not an option, hardness is often considered as a solution. This poses a significant limitation; while hardness testing offers advantages such as affordability, speed, ease of use, and suitability for testing small specimens, a hardness number is not a fundamental material property. Furthermore, practitioners are limited to conversions into a limited set of material property values, as hardness numbers cannot give full stress-strain curves, which means that without further information finite element modelling cannot always be conducted accurately

Cost and time constraints in Additive Manufacturing (AM) parameter development have traditionally separated parameter selection from mechanical property assessment. This flawed method often leads to costly delays, wasted innovation, and misleading results due to initial data shortages and unexpected material behaviour. Could prioritizing mechanical properties from the start be a feasible solution?

In collaboration with the University of Limerick, this case study investigates the suitability of PIP testing to explore the detection of property variations in parts produced through additive manufacturing.

The objective of this case study was to obtain accurate mechanical testing data for a small, extruded aluminium part from a bike rim, provided by Spur, using PIP testing. If successful, it would demonstrate a practical way of obtaining key data for small and complex components with minimal processing and turnaround times.

In this case study, conducted in collaboration with Professor Roger Reed and Dr. Tony Tang from the University of Oxford, we assess whether PIP testing can be used to measure stress-strain curves on small alloy samples made by additive manufacturing.

The aim of this case study, conducted in conjunction with Ovako, was to use PIP testing to characterise a case-hardened layer by indenting planar surfaces after progressive removal of thin surface layers.

The objective in this study, conducted in collaboration with The Welding Institute, was to determine if PIP testing could accurately map the stress-strain behaviour across a weld with a fine spatial resolution, and to quantify the time and cost savings that PIP offers over traditional tensile testing when used for characterising weld mechanical properties.

In this study we use PIP testing to spatially map the variations in mechanical properties across a large forged Aluminum component

This investigation relates to two types of sample supplied by Energy Densification Systems. These were both a shaped component of Hardox steel, with and without a cermet insert brazed into it. Via PIP testing it was possible to obtain stress-strain relationships for local areas of the component. The heat treatment associated with the brazing process (which was not revealed to PLX) induced significant changes in the stress/strain responses of all locations.