Automotive industry faces numerous evolutions regarding environment regulations and parts reliability. Through the specific case of a cylinder head, actual and forthcoming challenges for low-cycle and thermal–mechanical fatigue design in an industrial context are presented. With a description of current design approaches and highlighting limitations, this work focuses on variable loadings, constitutive models and their interaction with the environment, fatigue criteria, and structure validations, the four major steps to meet a reliable design. The need to carry out extended experimental databases for different complexity levels is emphasized to provide a better understanding of loadings and their impact on the strength of materials and structures, as well as the production of more physically-based models that are easier to identify and lead to higher levels of reliability in the thermal–mechanical design process.

The Additive Manufacturing (AM) ability of AD730® alloy by laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) is investigated for comparison with the cast & wrought AD730® alloy developed by Aubert & Duval for gas turbine applications. Several designs of experiments were needed to identify stable manufacturing conditions and build-up strategy in terms of low defect rate and microstructure soundness. In particular, the laser power, the scan speed, the layers' thickness, the hatching distance, and the scanning strategy were determined to successfully produce crack-free samples. The PBF-LB AD730® alloy exhibits columnar grains along the build direction. The resultant texture is close to a singlecrystalline-like cube texture. Upon annealing (solution annealing + single aging treatment), such a strong texture is preserved despite the formation of a network of fine transgranular secondary g' precipitates. Room temperature tensile properties are encouraging with yield stress lying between the coarse and fine grain microstructures of cast & wrought AD730®, for both orientations. An anisotropic mechanical behavior is obtained with higher properties for specimens printed along X and Y orientations than along Z. Finally, no evidence of premature failure due to micro-cracks has been detected in the overall test specimens.