August 2019 Volume 1

INDUSTRY NEWS & CALENDAR

‘Additive manufacturing is here to stay’ Oak Ridge’s Dr. Amy Elliott shares insights on power and promise of 3D printing By Lincoln Brunner

All you have to know about Amy Elliott’s love of 3D printing technology, you can see on her wrist. And her feet. And in the research she’s done, the patents she’s been awarded and the work she’s doing right now with X1 company’s inkjet related Binderjet applications. Elliott, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, gave one of the

and they’re all at different levels of commercialization. So actually, the technology that I work with in Binderjet is already seeing huge commercialization in metal injection molding replacement. [Showing a tiny, earring-sized engine block created by X1 with tiny holes bored throughout]: That’s the size of a metal-injection molded part, but the complexity is just far past what you could get with a mold. And so, you think about the limitations we’ve had with metal injected molded parts. It’s happening now: We’re seeing the transformation of an industry because of this technology, and it’s in mass-production. FIA: Any projects that you’re involved in right now that you can mention? AE: There’ s a lot of movement in tooling.This is our saying: “The top three applications in manufacturing are tooling, tooling, tooling.” Tooling is high value, low volume, high cost, long lead time. All of those things, we can actually improve with additive manufacturing. We can make the tools very quickly compared to normal cycle times. So, [if] you cut the machining down 90 percent, you still have to do the initial registering of the part, which is something we want to make sure people know we’re not skirting over. I know some of these hard tool steels that we’re doing high-speed machining on, even though it’s called high-speed machining, you still spend hours and hours carving out the bulk of a tool. So, if we can start with a net shape, I think that could definitely make a difference. And then, even the cooling channels—I think there’s a big opportunity in that for forging and other hot work industries, where you can really control the temperature of your tool as you go to really improve your cycle time or maybe improve your tool life. There’s a lot of things you could do with that, and I think we’re just beginning to understand the impact that that could have. FIA: As young people begin to look at careers, what are some things you would say to them in terms of getting them to think about this relatively brand-new technology of additive manufacturing? AE: I think additive manufacturing is here to stay, and it’s going to be in lots of different industries in different ways. The very basic level is now prototyping—I think most shops now have 3D printers to do their prototyping. But then we’ll see so much more of it in use in production, like for tooling and maybe even for low-volume customer orders. Maybe the forging industry could leverage this to take in those low-volume customer orders that may not have been viable before. Who knows what the future will bring?

keynote addresses at June’s Forge Fair 2019 and sat down with FIA Magazine to talk about how she got into additive manufacturing in the first place and what excites her most about the prospects for the technology. FIA: Howdo you see what you do atOakRidgeNational Laboratory merging with heavy industry like what you see here at Forge Fair? AE: That’s actually what we strive to do is work with industry that’s already going full-force with industry that’s already going full-force with what they’re doing. They have an expertise. They’re running with it. We try to catch up, we try to take some fundamental challenges that they’re having and help them with those things that maybe they don’t have the capacity or the expertise to do. And so we really do ty to come together with industry and find those strategic opportunities to partner and to advance their capabilities so that ultimately, U.S. manufacturing can be competitive in the world. FIA: Tellme more about the companies you work with… AE: I personally have a focus on one technology. My focus is in inkjet—I kind of play in that space. So, X1 is one of the older 3D printing companies and they do a technology called Binderjet, which is a metal powder spread into a layer, you pull it together layer by layer, and then you fire the part like a piece of pottery. Our partnerships with companies like that are really the reason that we exist. So, without that industry link, we can’t be relevant, we can’t be useful. We have to have those industry partners to tell us what the challenges are, and we can direct our science toward that. FIA: Right now, as you alluded to in your keynote, a lot of it is a little more theory than practical reality on shop floors at this point in terms of mass production. What do you think it’s going to take to get it to where this is the latest thing across different metal sectors? AE: It’s so interesting. There are so many different technologies,

FIA MAGAZINE | August 2019 12