Wire + arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) for large scale components: aluminium alloys 2319 and 5554

Aluminium alloys are still the main airframe materials used in aircraft industry due to their relative low cost, light weight and high strength achievable with heat treatments. The conventional method of fabricating components with this material is a subtractive process from a solid block. This leads to high buy-to-fly ratio hence, high cost per part due also to time to manufacture and machining costs. Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) represents an opportunity to reduce waste and time to manufacure. This additive manufacturing technology is well suited for large-scale parts being characterized by a high deposition rate and promising to reduce also machining time. Its simple system setup is easily adaptable to different materials and manufacturing layout. In this work, in order to validate the system setup adopted, two different alloys were investigated. The first is a wrought aluminium copper alloy from the 2xxx series (2319), which is heat-treatable thus, the difference in mechanical properties and microstructure between the as manufactured and the heat treated material were studied. The second is a wrought aluminium magnesium alloy from the 5xxx series (5554). For this material the mechanical properties, the microstructure and two different stress directions for the tensile test were investigated.