Additive Manufacturing is used to produce parts of complicated geometry layer by layer. The strength and fatigue lifetime of such parts is still dubious, however, due to the inescapable presence of defects within the structure. In order to understand how such defects may interact and the overall shape of the stress fields associated with them, finite element modelling of components of comparable size following geometric guidelines was done.

Through use of tensile fatigue testing of specimens, theoretical results and hypotheses were compared with the real failure locations in order to understand the effects of defect size and shape with respect to the build direction. Only spherical defects were handled in this project, and future work may improve the assumptions and stress concentration results by testing different geometries and sizes of pores, as well as experimenting with different locations and inter-defect distances.