Everything Material in Material Science

In 1965, Gordon Moore set the path for the semiconductor revolution with his article “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” That vision of doubling the number of integrated circuits on each chip every 1-2 years was coined “Moore’s Law”. For the past 60 years, it has motivated exponential technology roadmaps that have transformed modern life.

Metal additive manufacturing is an exponential growth technology that has improved productivity by orders of magnitude in its 2+ decades of industrial use.  This is true across modalities with excited developments in wire based directed energy deposition, metal powder bed binder jetting, and metal laser powder bed fusion (PBF-L).  This presentation is focused on PBF-L and begins with a short technology history from the original developments in the 1990’s with productivity of 1 cm³ / day to today’s current PBF-L productivity of 15 cm³ / hour, roughly 2.5 orders of magnitude improvement. This is “where we are” and serves as the first portion of the talk.

The presentation will then transition to modern technologies that will drive metal PBF-L productivity to 100 cm^3 and beyond including data science and quality needs to support new printing paradigms. This will include new dynamic focus laser results on multiple alloy systems. In addition to productivity improvement, a discussion of energy efficiency improvements from moving to dynamic focus laser systems is included.

Covered in the presentation are views on opportunities for rapid qualification, testing, and quality management. This is the “how do we stay on track” and serves as the second portion of the talk. In closing, views on the current state of practice and future roadmaps will be shared.

Please fill out the form below to view Dr. Herderick’s powerpoint pdf presented at the AeroDef conference.  And please reach out if you would like to schedule a meeting directly with Dr. Herderick and the NSL Additive team.

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