Metal 3D printing holds the opportunity to revolutionize manufacturing today. With fully customizable 3D structures that form previously inaccessible geometries, metal additive manufacturing (AM) holds key opportunities to reduce waste in metals manufacturing while increasing the efficiency of our components. However, scientific gaps still persist in understanding how the complex microstructures form, evolve, and lead to difficult-to-predict mechanical properties.

Our group uses and develops operando microscopes and optical engineering to study and control how metal AM forms the complex and poorly understood microstructures that give rise to their unusual properties. We are particularly interested in how these dynamics change in the “hard to print” metals that show the most variability between process-parameters and properties.