No abstract

Structural materials used for safety critical applications require high strength and simultaneously high resistance against crack growth, referred to as damage tolerance. However, the two properties typically exclude each other and research efforts towards ever stronger materials are hampered by drastic loss of fracture resistance. Therefore, future development of novel ultra-strong bulk materials requires a fundamental understanding of the toughness determining mechanisms. As model material we use today’s strongest metallic bulk material, namely, a nanostructured pearlitic steel wire, and measured the fracture toughness on micron-sized specimens in different crack growth directions and found an unexpected strong anisotropy in the fracture resistance. Along the wire axis the material reveals ultra-high strength combined with so far unprecedented damage tolerance. We attribute this excellent property combination to the anisotropy in the fracture toughness inducing a high propensity for micro-crack formation parallel to the wire axis. This effect causes a local crack tip stress relaxation and enables the high fracture toughness without being detrimental to the material’s strength.

Maraging steels such as 1.2709 are high strengthhigh toughness alloys that gain their exceptional mechanical properties by the combination of nanometer-sized intermetallic precipitates and a martensitic matrix. Here the martensitic microstructure is not achieved by a high carbon content but by adding nickel to the chemical composition. In turn, the lack of carbon leads to good weldability and therefore makes these materials preferred candidates for additive manufacturing techniques, such as selective laser melting (SLM). Applications for SLM produced components are found especially in the tooling industry, where the implementation of inserts with intelligent conformal cooling channels in dies and moulds has already shown to drastically increase the tool lifetime. In this study, different maraging steels are investigated with respect to typical powder characteristics, such as sphericity, particle size distribution, on the one hand, and the microstructure as well as the achieved mechanical properties of the respective SLM printed parts, on the other hand.