TCT
ADDITIVE INSIGHT - 2
The job of a researcher is to keep reinventing and continue to ask “what’s next?” For Richard Hague, Professor of Additive Manufacturing and Director of the Centre for Additive Manufacturing (CfAM) at the University of Nottingham, that question has been at the core of numerous projects undertaken at the Centre over the last decade where the ‘what’ is poised to be multi-material, functional additive manufacturing (AM).
On this week's Additive Insight podcast, Hague joins us to talk about the opportunities for multi-material, multifunctional additive manufacturing, the challenges around turning research into industrial applications, and the UK's position as an AM research superpower.
On the decision to focus on multi-material, multifunctional AM, Hague said: "We wanted to do something a little bit different. For me, if you're going to be a leading research group, you need to be doing leading research. I didn't want to be a group that continued just to make shapes, which we probably were in the 1990s, and wanted to transform the group to be much more of a science-based activity that was at the cutting edge, doing the materials and process development for additive. So, we hit on this idea of multi-material, multifunctional stuff, which no one was really doing at the time.
"For me, it's always been not what it is, it's how it's made, I’m much more interested in the process, and industry and people will come along and use it for different applications. You can see it in single material conventional additive manufacturing today, the kind of applications we get today are incredible and no one would have imagined that 20 years ago when we first started doing additive manufacturing research."
More ways to listen:
