Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing: Invar Deposition Characterization

This paper explains and analyzes an investigation into the characteristics of Invar, a Nickel-Iron alloy, with regards to deposition through Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing performed by the Metal Big Area Additive Manufacturing (MBAAM) team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF). The Invar alloy is extremely valuable to multiple fields because of its thermal expansion properties. These fields will attain financial benefits when turning to additive manufacturing as the future production technique for their Invar parts. As such, it will be necessary for AM research to become accustomed with the characteristics of Invar deposition. One of the potential AM techniques that has the potential to carry out printing with this material is Wire-Arc AM. The goal of this paper is to narrow down and call out different welding parameters that optimize the characteristics of Invar deposition using the Wire-Arc AM technique.