A review on the suitability of wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) for stainless steel 316

Stainless steel 316 (SS316) is an austenitic steel having excellent durability, good biocompatibility, adequate elevated temperature properties. In addition to this, SS 316 is satisfying the application used at cryogenic temperature. Along with above-mentioned characteristic SS 316 having excellent corrosion resistant at the room as well as elevated temperature. The listed properties are engaging this material to be used in a nuclear plant, chemical processing and seashore oil wells applications. Typically, these applications need complex parts with high quality. Because of their special design, the conventional manufacturing process is not suitable. Particularly parts like vacuum vessel, plasma-facing components, support structures and other various subsystems in nuclear plant involved with two or more manufacturing process. If no of steps is more the time and errors are also to be more. This needs more time, manpower and materials to produce a complete component on time. Additive Manufacturing (AM) or Rapid Prototyping (RP) is the alternative for fabricating these components. For metallic materials newly developed technique in the welding field, is Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) which can rectify the above statement. The main advantage of this process is creating the complicated shapes in a single process with high dimensional accuracy, reduction in wastage of high-cost materials, and reducing the secondary operation time. After the fabrication little care is needed for getting good surface finishing. In this paper, the various additive manufacturing process used for SS 316 component production is discussed.