The Process focus area of the Roadmap is aimed at driving technological advancements that enable faster, more accurate, and higher detail resolution additive manufacturing machines with larger build volumes and improved “as-built” part quality.

This includes targeting critical technologies and associated sub-systems where the “machine level” process performance improvements are needed, similar to machine tool flexible manufacturing systems.

The improvement focus and associated impact analysis metrics for this area include:

• • build speed,
  • accuracy,
  • detail capability,
  • surface quality, and
  • maximum part size.

The Material focus area of the Roadmap is aimed at building the body of knowledge for benchmark additive manufacturing property characterization data and eliminating variability in “as-built” material properties.

This includes creating a paradigm shift away from controlling process parameters and “as-built” microstructures to instead controlling the underlying physics of the additive manufacturing process at the micro-scale to achieve consistent reproducible microstructures and hence, “as-designed” properties.

The required technical focus and associated impact analysis metrics for this area necessitate the development of:

• • standardized feedstock materials,
  • benchmark material property data,
  • process-property-structure relationships,
  • process window boundary definition, and
  • post-processing guidelines and specifications.

The Value Chain focus area of the Roadmap is aimed at driving technological advancements that enable step change improvements in end-to-end value chain cost and time to market for additive manufacturing produced products.

This includes rapid qualification/certification methods, as well as a holistic focus on integrating technologies, across the entire product cradle-to-cradle life cycle, including material and product recyclability. This area has also been designed to help drive a priority focus on identifying advanced manufacturing enterprise (AME) opportunities for creating a single, integrated digital thread to help identify workforce skill set needs and technology enablers, such as design aides and apps to improve productivity, and highlight the need for new and novel rapid design and inspection technologies.

The technical focus and associated impact analysis metrics for this area include:

• • processing costs,
  • feedstock material costs,
  • quality control costs,
  • labor productivity costs, and
  • energy efficiency costs.

The Additive Manufacturing Genome focus area of the Roadmap is aimed at accelerating technological advancements that enable step change improvements in the time and cost required to design, develop, and qualify new materials for additive manufacturing.

This includes the development of new and novel computational methods, such as physics-based and model-assisted material property prediction tools, the development of common benchmark data sets needed to validate the computational predictions, and new and novel ideas for material property characterization that help break the cycle of developing design allowables for “every” new additive manufacturing material-process combination.

The technical focus and associated impact analysis metrics for this area are similar to the national materials genome initiative, which include:

• • computer-aided materials development,
  • modular open simulation frameworks,
  • access to open transparent material property data,
  • multi-scale data management and sharing, and
  • efficient material property characterization methods.