DARPA funds Penn State metal AM qualification research
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Penn State, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA, $1.6 million in funding to support Additive Manufacturing research led by Guha Manogharan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D). Through a subcontract, Manogharan will conduct research with Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
DARPA has awarded a contract, worth up to $6.2 million in funding, to the project titled One Part And Life (OPAL) through DARPA’s Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Endurance (SURGE) programme. Manogharan will apply his experience in Additive Manufacturing and the state-of-the-art machinery available through CIMP-3D to investigate the qualification approach.
While metal AM is garnering widespread industry adoption, traditional approaches of qualifying and certifying the stability of the resultant components are expensive and inefficient, requiring researchers to qualify AM parts on a machine-by-machine basis. This significantly slows broader adoption of metal AM for large-scale production, as following current qualification and certification approaches can take years of expensive research, development and testing.
The goal of SURGE is to improve this process by developing a new approach of assessing individual additively manufactured parts’ fatigue performance during the build process. According to Manogharan, the approach will accelerate broader adoption of metal AM for functional applications by enabling immediate and unique assessments of fatigue performance of parts manufactured on any operational metal Additive Manufacturing machine.
“We are aiming to significantly improve both the prediction accuracy and reduce computing time for estimating service life of metal parts printed with Additive Manufacturing,” Manogharan said. “If a manufacturer prints a metal part for rapid deployment, we want to predict how long the part will be useful given the conditions of its application. We will be able to accurately predict the defects in the part that impact the fatigue life of a part, or the part life until it needs to be replaced.”
According to Manogharan, this funding will help researchers advance the robustness and efficiency of the metal AM supply chain across the United States. He said he believes that further development of the technology and streamlining of the qualification processes will accelerate the large-scale industry adoption of metal Additive Manufacturing.
“Our lab has been leading several efforts in both direct and indirect metal AM for a decade now,” Manogharan said. “This technology could revolutionise the production process for metal parts in defence, aerospace and a variety of other engineering applications, making it faster and more efficient than ever before.”
