How casting, forging, machining, welding, and additive manufacturing each change a material's microstructure and properties, the process-induced defects characteristic of each, and how to match a manufacturing process to a material and application.
Every manufacturing process a material passes through changes its actual microstructure, which means two parts made from the identical alloy to the identical drawing can have meaningfully different real-world properties depending purely on how they were produced. This module works through five major process families with a consistent lens on each: what happens to the microstructure, what defects the process characteristically introduces, and when that process is actually appropriate for a given material and application.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a forged crankshaft resists fatigue better than an equivalent cast one, why a weld's heat-affected zone is frequently its weakest point, and why additively manufactured parts can show anisotropic properties a wrought part of the same alloy does not — knowledge Module 13's fractography and Module 16's testing methods both depend on to trace a defect back to the process that created it.