The Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is well-known for some high-profile 3D printing projects, like the Shelby Cobra sports car; the house for the Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy project; and a replica of a 1952 Willys Jeep, which took only three weeks to print and assemble.

What about lower-profile projects? Can small to medium-sized fabrication shops benefit from the additive manufacturing (AM) research efforts at the Knoxville, Tenn., facility?“About half of the collaborative research agreements that we put on are with small to medium enterprises,” said Craig Blue, director of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs for the Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate at ORNL.

Through a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and UT-Battelle, the MDF gives businesses of all sizes access to unique research facilities and reduces their risk when adopting cutting-edge AM and composite technologies.Not only does AM remove the traditional limits on part-geometry complexity, it also allows components to be fabricated faster while consuming less material and energy during the production process.

“About a third of the energy that we use in the United States goes into manufacturing, so at MDF we’re trying to understand how to decrease the overall energy use in industry by looking at efficient manufacturing practices,” said MDF Director Bill Peter. He added that saving energy costs when manufacturing components often translates to energy savings in the products those components go into.

“If you can make a lighter vehicle using a low-cost carbon fiber, you have a huge energy reduction in transportation and in energy generation,” he said. “We’re looking at how to use these advanced technologies to create new supply chains, as well as trying out innovative ideas in design and equipment.”

These new technologies significantly affect application areas from aeronautics to robotics to automobiles to biomedical devices. For aerospace components, for example, this design-to-manufacture process has already demonstrated the potential to reduce the buy-to-fly ratio from an industry average of 8-to-1 (that is, 8 pounds of material will produce 1 pound of aerospace-quality material) to nearly 1-to-1.

The Epicenter of Additive

“We want to become the epicenter for advanced manufacturing, so if somebody wants to become more competitive, this place is the tip of the spear,” said Lonnie Love, ORNL Corporate Fellow researcher and leader of the Manufacturing Systems Research Group.“We’re leveraging a $1.8 billion- to $2 billion-a-year R&D shop—the Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” said Love. “Dozens of university students and faculty work here year-round, and about half of the people in this building are co-located from other companies to work side by side with us, which accelerates tech transference.”

And, MDF is committed to developing new manufacturing technologies as quickly as possible.“A year could mean life or death for a company. This is a very competitive market, and to keep up we have to innovate faster than somebody can copy,” said Tom Kurfess, senior distinguished scientist for manufacturing. “You’re going to see state-of-the-art stuff demonstrated in this facility. It’s always the latest technology because it gets changed out every few months.”

Tooling Time

Possibly the most valuable and universal application of 3D printing in fabrication shops is tooling.

“At MDF we get about 4,500 visits a year, representing about 700 or 800 companies, and overwhelmingly the area where they have issues is lead times associated with tooling,” said Peter.

“We as a nation pull about 70, 80 percent of the dies and tools we use from either Asia or South America, and that drives one of the pain points for [our] manufacturing practice, because it restricts how fast we can innovate,” he said.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D printing for tooling, researchers from MDF demonstrated “A Die a Day” at the 2018 IMTS expo.“Each day of the conference we printed a new tool, machined it, hardfaced it, and then started stamping out parts so people at the show could see a new item being produced,” said Peter.

“We’re looking at how to innovate and quickly produce tooling such as compression molding and 3D printing polymer tools, which are great for prototyping and getting a first evaluation,” Peter added. “But if you’re getting up beyond a thousand-part production run, you really need to start looking at steel tools.”

To that end, MDF is working on a system with Wolf Robotics and Lincoln Electric that features a gas metal arc welding (GMAW) system on a robotic arm that, based on a digital drawing, prints steel tools by welding wire into 3D parts.

“Basically, we start with a face plate on a turntable, build up a section, and then rotate the turntable to build up fins or other structures off of that,” Peter said.

Manufacturing plants are familiar with robotic GMAW systems, but reprogramming them and developing the controls to print out a large object from a digital drawing is different than an automated welding section in a robotic cell, Peter said. A robotic 3D printing system “isn’t something that would break the bank, because you’re looking at equipment already on a manufacturing floor, but you’re repurposing it towards a new way of thinking, where you can build whatever you want.”

Working With MDF

Peter described MDF as a “white-hat organization with nothing to sell. It’s all based on the technology and the fundamental science that we apply to these technologies. Our mission is to try to understand where and how to create new opportunities for companies in order to make sure we have U.S. competitiveness in manufacturing, and how to get this technology into the hands of companies so they can create new products that allow them to create new jobs.”

A big benefit of working with MDF compared to an equipment manufacturer that typically carries only one or two types of print technologies, is that MDF provides access to buildings full of equipment to test–along with expert researchers familiar with all the different brands and technologies.

MDF clients have access to equipment for electron-beam AM, laser sintering, laser-blown powder deposition, binder jetting, metal laser melting, fused deposition modeling, multihead photopolymer deposition, and robotic welding.

“A company might come in with their own material or their own part geometry and want to compare, say, the benefits of laser binder jetting versus electron-beam-melt 3D printing,” Peter said. “It may be that, based on our initial dialogue, we already know they probably don’t want to go down a certain pathway, because there are going to be major issues. So maybe we’ll recommend trying out another system.”

Matching Contributions

When MDF begins to work with a company, it lays out the scope of activities and technologies in a four-page template application.

“We talk with them to determine whether the project is a good fit, making sure no similar work is already being done commercially,” explained Peter. "We’ve tried to make this as easy for companies as possible, especially for small to medium enterprises that may not have a lot of history working with the Department of Energy.”

For a typical project at MDF, $40,000 is invested by the company, an amount matched by DOE funds that pay ORNL employees. So, essentially, no money changes hands. Both the company and MDF agree to perform different activities to support the project, and questions about proprietary information are settled upfront.

“For example, we may build the part and they will do the testing back at their facility,” Peter said. “But we invite the company to come here and take part in our part of the project as well, because a lot of that gets transferred as you’re going through this process and evaluating the technology.”

Every other week applications are reviewed at the DOE headquarters in Oak Ridge; decisions about which companies to work with are based on merit.

The agreements give the DOE and the company nonexclusive rights to new technologies. However, the company can stipulate at the beginning of a project that if a technology proves out, the company will be the exclusive licensee for certain areas of application.These MDF-company projects have proven to be win-win-win situations for all involved: the manufacturer, ORNL, and the public.

“Each project results in a report that goes live on our website, though no intellectual property, such as part geometry or material chemistry, is shared,” Peter said. “So, we’ve been able to publicly disseminate these technologies, offering fair use of public dollars, while making sure we have the company’s interest in mind.”