Elementum 3D’s aluminium Additive Manufacturing feedstock selected for America Makes project call
January 31, 2024
Elementum 3D, Thornton, Colorado, USA, has announced that its proposal has been selected by America Makes, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, to qualify its commercially available, high-strength A7050-RAM2 aluminium Additive Manufacturing feedstock, for funding under the Proliferation of AM Materials Datasets project call.
The goal of the programme is to generate material datasets with high statistical power for industrially relevant aluminium and nickel alloys, with a focus on accelerating the adoption of Additive Manufacturing in the American aerospace, automotive, defence, and energy sectors. With these datasets in place, engineers can use these materials for critical applications with an extremely low tolerance for failure.
Heading the project, Elementum 3D will incorporate products and services from Additive Manufacturing software, hardware, and researchers, including:
- Battelle
- Castheon, Inc.
- Dyndrite Corporation
- Eaton Corporation
- EOS North America
- Incodema, Inc.
- National Institute for Aviation Research
- Product Evaluation Systems, Inc.
- The Ohio State University Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence
- Westmoreland Mechanical Testing and Research
Dr Jacob Nuechterlein, Elementum 3D president and founder, stated, “America Makes’ push to advance AM material datasets is monumental for the manufacturing industry. It stimulates greater confidence in high-strength aluminium print quality and broadens the AM supply chain. We are excited to join forces with the other awardees. Together, our expansive knowledge and expertise in materials development establishes the future of AM materials.”
Manufacturers consistently express the need for access to lightweight, high-strength aluminium materials that offer excellent fatigue and stress corrosion cracking resistance for rapid on-demand components. This is why Elementum 3D’s manufacturable A7050-RAM2 earned the gold medal in the 2020 US Air Force Advanced Manufacturing Olympics first-ever Material Hurdles event.
This project has been funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Research and Engineering Manufacturing Technology Office (OSD(R&E)) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The program awards Elementum 3D with project cost reimbursements up to $2,875,000. Elementum 3D and consortium partners will commit at least 50% of this amount as cost share, for a total project effort of more than $4.2 million.
Results of this America Makes programme will be available to America Makes members as well as the US Government.
“Most industries are just beginning to see the opportunities provided by Additive Manufacturing,” shared Steve Walton, head of product, Dyndrite. “Broader adoption of Additive Manufacturing in critical industries like defence, energy, and aerospace has been hampered by lack of public, traceable, statistically significant data sets that characterise high value materials. We look forward to working alongside Elementum 3D and America Makes to reverse this paradigm. We are helping to proliferate knowledge that enables new solutions through the adoption of Additive Manufacturing.”
As a part of this project, Dyndrite will provide copies of its LPBF Pro software to enable rapid build preparation, materials and process development, and report generation for qualifications for the EOS metal Additive Manufacturing machines selected for this effort. LPBF Pro will largely automate the process of generating AM material data sets, traditionally a tedious manual task. There software also aims to improve the process of communicating methodology and achieving repeatable results, a traditionally user-error-prone process.
“We congratulate Elementum 3D on their selection for the America Makes Proliferation of AM Material Datasets, and EOS is proud to play a significant supporting role in the initiative,” stated Yash Parikh, process engineering consultant at EOS. “We are dedicated to the project through our cost-sharing pledge and steadfast commitment to realising the desired production results for customers and are thrilled to embark on this project as an esteemed research partner, with a focus on providing guidance on qualification and best practices to expedite it.”
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