America Makes, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute has announced the seven recipients of its latest additive manufacturing (AM) Project Call.
The project driven by the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) plans to give $5.5 million to multiple awardees with $5.5 million in matching funds from the winning project teams. This fourth Project Call will bring America Makes’ funding total to $100 million in public and private funds that are investing in advancing AM in the U.S..
“We are excited to get the projects from this latest Project Call underway as they achieved an unprecedented level of balance between advancing the technical R&D industry needs and developing solid workforce, education, and outreach plans that are so crucial to the successful transition and commercialisation of the project outcomes,” Rob Gorham, America Makes Director of Operations, commented. “America Makes and its membership community are committed to ensuring that the U.S. manufacturing workforce is educated in using AM innovations for our nation’s economic competitive advantage.”
The winners are:
- Carnegie Mellon University to develop a computational system and education materials for the optimal design and AM of tooling structures for aerospace.
- University of Texas at El Paso to advance AM build volumes and production rates by combining large scale AM with wire embedding.
- Wolf Robotics, LLC, a Lincoln Electric Company to help AM users take advantage of lower cost and increased flexibility with scalable, multi-axis (nine or more) robot systems.
- 3D Systems to develop multi-jet printing materials designed to address the lack of printable materials suitable for biometric modelling in healthcare.
- Phoenix Analysis & Design Technologies, Inc. to focus on lattice structure design and manufacturing with a robust, validated material model.
- Youngstown Business Incubator to transform the U.S. industrial base with development of next-generation sand printers.
- Raytheon to advance AM from 2D constrained designs in conformal and embedded solutions to enable multi-material printing of 3D electronics.
“With this Project Call, we made some modifications to the proposal process and those changes yielded positive results in membership involvement, proposal quality, and overall, a more productive proposal process,” John Wilczynski, America Makes Deputy Director of Technology Development, added. “We look forward to officially kicking off these projects next month.”