Phase3D has commenced a technical collaboration phase 2 multi-year credo with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that will focus on binder jetting technology.
CEO Niall O’Dowd teased the collaborative effort on this week’s Additive Insight podcast while detailing the work of several of its development partners.
Phase3D has developed a software-hardware solution for in-situ monitoring of additive manufacturing technologies – with an initial focus on powder-based metal processes – and earlier this year introduced its early adopter program for its Fringe product offering.
With the company still in an early phase, its website lists a range of development partners which includes NASA, the US Air Force, Illinois Institute of Technology and ORNL. Speaking to TCT this week, O’Dowd revealed that its work with ORNL is focusing on “powder anomalies and binder anomalies on binder jetted parts.” Already, the partners have conducted successful feasibility studies and have recently “moved through contracting to get the technical collab phase 2 started.”
Phase3D will be making public some more details of this collaborative effort in due course, while work with NASA and the US Air Force runs concurrently. NASA has purchased a Phase3D sensor and entered into a year-long cooperative research agreement where the partners are running builds to, again, look at the impact of anomalies on parts and microstructure formation, while improving Phase3D’s monitoring technology to suit their needs. And, as reported by TCT in July, Phase3D is also working to develop a cold spray 3D printing quality inspection system for the Air Force Research Lab. This partnership, also a phase 2 contract, sees Phase3D working to “adapt [its] solution to cold spray 3D printing for recladdings and coatings.”
O’Dowd told TCT’s Additive Insight podcast: “[The Air Force Research Lab] has been an excellent development partner. It’s been really interesting to see how they use additive. In many aspects, they are on the forefront of qualifying parts for air worthiness, which is a big push of ours. You can print amazing parts that can solve problems and that are simply impossible to make with any other kind of technology, but until you can qualify or certify those parts, you can’t have them fly. So, our goal with the Air Force is to reduce the time to achieve airworthiness for a part and also ensure part quality of the part they’re printing today matches all of the data that they’ve captured historically on that part.”
While this cold spray quality inspection system is being developed with the US Air Force, it has been ‘baked into the contract’ that Phase3D will be able to offer the resulting technology commercially at the end of the project.
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