Contact: Dr. Michael De Volder & Dr. Davor Copic, Institute for Manufacturing; Julian Peck & Ben Ting, Cambridge Enterprise
Mentor: Dr. Marc Bax
Additive manufacturing (AM) has attracted great public and academic interest, due to its promise to create new complex products, co-locate design and manufacturing, drastically shorten supply chains, and reduce carbon emissions. Frequent reports in both media and academia showcase incremental improvements in metal AM technologies; however, fundamental issues with material properties and fabrication speeds are still not addressed. For instance, metal AM build rates need to increase by one to three orders of magnitude and the thermal stress of these parts needs to be greatly reduced prior to wide industrial adaption.
Dr. Michael De Volder and Dr. Davor Copic have developed a disruptive AM technology that bypasses several emerging shortcomings of current technologies (low accuracy, slow build speeds).
The challenges for the i-Team are to investigate further applications of this additive manufacturing technology and potential industrial partners who may be interested in its deployment.
