Open Access

Dennis Pede, Mo Li, Tobias Poleske, Hadi Mozaffari Jovein

• Corrosion is a process that needs to be viewed carefully in context with the examined metals or alloys as well as the ambient conditions (e.g. electrolyte composition). Additive manufacturing processes with their formation a of microscale melt and rapid solidification of that melt can lead to microstructures that can differ extremely from conventional manufacturing processes in terms of their homogeneity and distribution of (alloying) elements. Therefore, process–related local inclusions can be formed with higher amounts of certain alloying elements than their surroundings which result in different chemical potentials. Corrosion experiments performed with additive manufactured parts (e.g. made of pure titanium or titanium alloys) show the release of potentially unwanted alloy constituents, which in turn can affect the long–term behavior of the part negatively. As part of the investigations it is shown what kind of influence the additive manufacturing process can have on such built parts and how subsequently applied treatments like machining or heat treatment can alter the properties of the material and produced component. Different methods like metallography or potentiodynamic polarization with subsequent mass spectrometric analyses were eventually performed to investigate the mentioned material properties and behaviour.