Hydrogen effect on the mechanical performance of additive manufactured Ti-6Al-4V

Additive manufacturing  is one of the most promising advanced production methods for many challenging applications. Additive manufacturing can be used to produce components which are often exposed to a hydrogen environment. In addition, H is often cited as future energy carrier as it might offer an alternative for the scarce fossil fuels without the production of harmful CO2 emissions. The main requirement to realize a safe use of hydrogen as a fuel is the development of manufacturing technology producing reliable components in hydrogen containing atmosphere. Unfortunately, the combination of hydrogen and additive manufactured metals offers challenges since hydrogen can cause unpredictable failure. This significantly impedes the applicability of these alloys. This proposal will look at this topic from a wide-ranging length scale and aims at getting fundamental understanding on how hydrogen affects the mechanical properties of additive manufactured Ti-based alloys. This will be done by comparing different kinds of hydrogen, i.e. internal hydrogen and/or hydrides, in both additive manufactured and conventionally cast Ti-6Al-4V.