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For the design of thick-walled nodular cast iron components, fatigue assessment, especially in the context of local imperfections in the material, is a challenging task. Not only the cyclic material behavior of the sound baseline material, but also the cyclic behavior of materials with imperfections, such as shrinkages, dross and chunky graphite, needs to be considered during the design process of cast iron components. In addition to this, new materials, such as solid solution strengthened alloys, offer new possibilities in lightweight design, but need to be assessed concerning their fatigue strength and elastic-plastic material behavior. If a safe and reproducible fatigue assessment for any component cannot be performed and a secure usage is therefore not given, the cast components are generally rejected, leading to a loss of additional material, energy and money for recasting the component.

The flexibility in design offered by advanced additive manufacturing technologies makes these processes more and more attractive for automotive and aircraft applications and, also, for the production of safety relevant metal components. The high strength, thermally resistant nickel-based alloy Inconel®718 is widely used by the aircraft industry and its low level of machinability makes it an optimal candidate for AM technologies. The challenge, together with improving the process, is now to build the path that will bring AM technologies from rapid prototyping to series production. Therefore, it is essential to investigate additively manufactured materials and the effect that subsequent processing, such as, for example surface preparation, has on their properties. Furthermore, while the static properties of additively manufactured Inconel®718 have already been investigated, this work aims to describe its cyclic stress-strain behavior, which can be used for fatigue assessment.

Fatigue testing is known to be time consuming and expensive. Therefore, it should be the main target of fatigue research to accelerate the derivation of fatigue properties. Depending on the required properties, strain- or load-controlled fatigue tests have to be performed. Carrying out load-controlled fatigue tests is necessary to derive the influence of mean stresses and notches on the fatigue strength and fatigue life of different materials and joining technologies. In the case of material samples, increasing test frequencies could be a proper way to accelerate the fatigue testing, as long as the increased test frequencies have no influence on the resulting fatigue life. In the case of strain-controlled fatigue tests, it is not possible to increase the test frequencies in order to accelerate the fatigue tests. Therefore, the Incremental Step Test, which allows the derivation of the cyclic stress-strain curve with only one test, was introduced.

Additive manufacturing offers new options for lightweight design for safety parts under cyclic loading conditions. In order to utilize all advantages and exploit the full potential of additive manufactured parts, the main impact factors on the cyclic material behavior not only have to be identified and quantified but also prepared for the numerical fatigue assessment. This means in case of the AlSi10Mg aluminum alloy to consider influences related to the exposure strategy, heat treatment, microstructure, support structures and the surface conditions, as well as the influence of the load history and finally the interaction of these influences in order to perform a high quality fatigue assessment. Due to these reasons, and with respect to the numerical effort, the cyclic material behavior of additively manufactured AlSi10Mg produced by selective laser melting will be discussed.