long path from converting raw materials into fi nished parts that will then be joined and assembled into a fi nal product. As one looks across a vast factory fl oor today, it is full of machines, equipment, tools and software—individual manufacturing technologies—and each and every one is the subject of scientifi c research and development somewhere. People unfamiliar with manufacturing work don’t often realize that companies around the world commer- cialize and sell these tech- nologies, and manufacturers such as Apple Inc., General Motors Corp., Caterpillar, Inc. and the Boeing Co., buy them to make the products they sell. These advanced processes are precisely the valuable of- fering that the NNMI seeks to develop and sell. While most people have heard of Apple and GM, the companies that make the manufacturing technologies in their factories are usually not household names, even though they are powerful global companies. When legendary investor Warren Buffett bought one such company, Israeli toolmaker ISCAR, for $6 billion between 2006 and 2013, few people outside of manufacturing had likely ever heard of the cutting-
edge company, but it employs 6,000 employees around the world and spends millions every year on R&D.
A Wide Spectrum of Readiness The advanced manufacturing technologies of today and
From every corner of manufacturing, a raft of technological advances have been made over the past decade.
tomorrow, and the companies that make them, such as IS- CAR, are all in various states of maturity. Some are considered emerging technologies. That includes 3D printing, also
known as additive manufacturing (AM), which gets a great deal of attention for the idea that one could, someday, print any object in any material. In AM, an object is built from a digital design fi le by printing one layer of material at a time. But even within 3D printing, a wide range of processes are used to build objects, such as selective laser sintering, electron beam melting, and fused deposition modeling, just to name a few. Each of these technologies has a number of limitations and challenges that must be overcome in order to make AM more marketable. This research requires advanced knowledge about materials, lasers, software and more.
The 3D Race is On
In 2009, Stratasys (Minneapolis & Rehovot, Israel) and Autodesk (San Rafael, CA) unveiled the fi rst full-scale turbo-prop aircraft engine model produced using Stratasys FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) technology, a form of AM.
In Australia in 2015, Prof. Xinhua Wu, a professor of materials engineering at Monash University in Melbourne and director of the Monash Centre for Additive Manufacturing (MCAM), led the team that has created the world’s fi rst 3D-printed jet engine using selective laser melting (SLM).
June 2015 |
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