Computational Investigation on the Combined Effect of Applied Strain and Pore Configuration on Strain Concentrators in Additively Manufactured Metals

ABSTRACT Metal additive manufacturing (AM) provides a pathway for creating highly optimized components that would be difficult to produce using traditional manufacturing methods. However, regardless of printing parameters or postprocessing, porosity remains a prevalent challenge in AM components because strain concentrates in the vicinity of the pore, compromising fatigue performance. This study uses finite element analysis to investigate the combined effect of applied load, pore aspect ratio, orientation, and location on strain concentration factors (ECFs) under elastic and plastic deformation. Keyhole and lack‐of‐fusion pores are idealized as prolate and oblate ellipsoids, respectively. Isolated porosity is modeled through plasticity simulations in an automated workflow. Ultimately, novel explicit formulas relating the applied strain and pore configuration to ECF are developed. The model is used to rapidly quantify the uncertainty and extreme values in ECF, where the distribution of inputs is obtained from statistics of AM builds, to advance the development of computationally assisted approaches for qualification of AM components.