Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology makes possible the direct conversion of digital complex shapes into physical products. This can be done automatically only with one production step with less waste of time and material with respect to traditional manufacturing processes. Over the last years, AM technology has incredibly evolved allowing to produce complex parts at different scale levels and for different strategic and sensitive industrial and engineering applications positively impacting on the overall economy. AM can be used in fact from prototyping to production and repairing of functional industrial components ready for service. This revolution has touched almost all the categories of materials allowing also to produce unprecedent material structures that can be tuned for multi-functional applications.

The diffuse use of AM technology has, in parallel, increased the importance of understanding and predicting the overall mechanical performance of AM parts. Structural integrity of AM products is in fact a key issue for the spreading of this technology in load-bearing applications. Many questions are still open especially for the newly developed materials. How the microstructure of printed material, surface condition, and statistics of the internal defects influence the final mechanical behavior is still not a completely answered question.

The present virtual special issue (VSI) is dedicated to the Fatigue and Fracture of Additively Manufactured Materials. The aim is to provide an overview of recent interesting aspect related to this research field touching the open issues that can be relevant for the final design. The VSI contains 11 papers from invited researchers. All the papers have been subjected to the standard peer review process commonly employed by FFEMS. This VSI embraces different works aimed to understand and deploy physics of fatigue and fracture of AM materials produced with the different available technologies giving an update state of the art on the topic.

As Guest Editors of this VSI, we are satisfied of the final result and hope that the present papers could be useful to researchers, designers, and colleagues who are involved, for different reasons, in the design of AM components.

We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions and all the reviewers for their effort to increase the quality of the present VSI. Sincere thanks also to FFEMS editorial team who helped and supported us with valuable and inexhaustible contribution.

F. Berto, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
M. Benedetti, University of Trento, Italy
A. du Plessis, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
N. Shamsaei, Auburn University, USA
Y. Hong, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China