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Iver Anderson
“There’s a lot of intense interest focused on additive manufacturing with metal alloys, because there are so many potential applications” - Iver Anderson
Two US science and technology national laboratories have been awarded $5 million from the United States Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO).
The AMO has injected the money into Ames Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the production and composition of metal alloy powders used in additive manufacturing.
While additive manufacturing has readily used polymers and plastics as it has reached a widespread measure of success in manufacturing processes, there are concerns over the volume of use of metal alloys. The AMO in particular believe it has lagged behind that of plastics and polymers due to a lack of both materials and process development.
“There’s a lot of intense interest focused on additive manufacturing with metal alloys, because there are so many potential applications,” said Iver Anderson, project leader and senior metallurgist at Ames Laboratory and adjunct professor in Materials Science and Engineering Department at Iowa State University. “Industry has demands for prototyping parts, design development, reducing waste of expensive materials, and efficiently producing custom and legacy components for their customers.”
Because additive manufacturing processes regularly use metal allow powders as its raw material, the ability to control the properties and quality of those powders is vastly important to the quality of the final product. Just as important is achieving properties equal to cast and machined or cast/ forged and machined parts.
“Today, if a manufacturer went to metal powder producers with a shopping list of the alloys and powder specifications they needed for their manufacturing process, they very likely wouldn’t find what they want,” said Anderson. “The customisation capabilities are just not there, and we need to get there. That is going to be the key to commercially competitive additive manufacturing processes.”
The project will look to improve powder production by developing advances in a high pressure gas atomisation process pioneered at Ames Laboratory and will design and customise alloys specifically for additive manufacturing processing techniques. A flow simulation code developed by National Energy Technology Laboratory will be used for the modelling and simulation of gas atomisation process stages. The experimental gas atomisation work and alloy design calculations/ verification will also be performed in the powder synthesis facilities at Ames Laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (ORNL-MDF) will conduct the corresponding additive manufacturing experiments.
AMO partners with a range of organisations to identify and invest in emerging technologies with the potential to create high-quality domestic manufacturing jobs. One of its most recent partners, Ames Laboratory is a US Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory operated by Iowa State University. Ames Laboratory is committed to developing innovative materials, technologies and energy solutions.
