Potentialities and criticalities of multiaxis Directed Energy Deposition of complex geometries

The interest towards metal-based Additive Manufacturing has greatly increased in the last decade. The possibility of printing in a short lapse of time an end-usable metal part has been encouraged by industry and developed by researchers, although not every technique has reached a sufficient development for the industrial implementation. Powder-bed techniques (LPBF, EBM) with about twenty years’ experience, are currently used and preferred to Direct Deposition techniques (DED, EBAM), which unfortunately still show visible issues. The industry follows with great interest Direct Deposition techniques development because of the great potential they currently represent, but their applications are currently restricted to repairment of valuable items and recoating. Literature shows poor production of end-usable parts, due to the complexity a numerical control Additive Manufacturing machine can represent. This work aims to investigate thoroughly some features which have been conceptualized and realized in the form of some benchmark components, to point out what is possible and what is not in a DED machine, to list and analyse what are the most common flaws and the most unexpected restrictions DED can produce.