“…Laser metal deposition (LMD) is an advanced additive manufacturing technology that uses a high energy density laser as a heat source to melt the powdered materials and produces dense metal parts in near-net shapes according to a predetermined trajectory [10,11]. It has many attractive advantages over conventional manufacturing processes for producing difficult-to-process high-performance large and critical metallic components (UHSS), e.g., no mold required, little waste and post-deposition machining, high material buy-tofly ratio, short production cycle, low production costs, few limitations of the component geometry, excellent design flexibility [12][13][14][15][16][17], high material utilization, high-efficiency, and one-shot shaping [18,19].…”