Page 18 - 3D Metal Printing Fall 2017

3D Educated AM Customers
CTC’s for-profit affiliate, Enterprise Ven- ture Corporation (EVC).
“EVC’s mission,” says Altergott, “is to transfer the advanced technology devel- opment emanating from CTC into the industrial base. As such, it leads nearly all production efforts here, as well as soft- ware sales, and also provides engineering services to our customers.”
Sabo walked us through projects the CTC AM team has completed over the
years, recognizing the proprietary nature of most of them. Among them:
• Supporting an NMC project to study electron-beam melting (using a Sciaky 3D printer) of Ti-6Al-4V, including validating
nondestructive evaluation processes on full-scale AM parts.
• An America Makes project for non- destructive testing of direct-metal laser- sintered parts (with the expectation to influence the standardized inspection process), including seeding defects and investigating methods for identifying those defects. The parts used for this work were printed by GE.
• A U.S. Army project to evaluate for- ward-deployed AM, and to identify the process and equipment most capable of being shipped to the front lines in a container.
• An Air Force Research Laboratory project investigating the use of laser pow- der-feed coatings for repair of gas-turbine engine parts.
Focus Shifts to Repair/Rebuild
The last several months have welcomed some big changes to the CTC AM group, as it looks to expand beyond new-part builds and internal R&D projects with laser powder-bed processing, and move into repair and rebuild applications.
“About 65 percent of our AM work right now is building parts and fixtures on the SLM machine,” says Sabo, “the rest being internal R&D projects. We don’t want to
CTC printed these parts—energy-recovery parts for a reverse-osmosis system, from Type 316L stainless steel— on its SLM laser powder-bed machine.
Where There Are R&D Engineers
and Scientists, There Are Patents
and Publications
Hundreds of scientists and engineers work at Concurrent Technologies Cor- poration (CTC) and for its for-profit affiliate Enterprise Ventures Corporation, with expertise in material science, welding, nondestructive testing and a host of other disciplines. As their combined efforts turn more and more to the world of AM, it’s to be expected that portions of their work become published and patented.
Two recent examples: CTC employees wrote a chapter, for a recently released textbook titled, “Cybersecurity for Industry 4.0,” on cybersecurity needs related to direct digital manufacturing (DDM). And, CTC engineers recently were awarded a patent for “Additive Manufacturing Using Metals from the Gaseous State.”
In the book chapter, CTC’s IT advisor Scott Zimmerman, along with a few others, addresses cybersecurity threats to the DDM community. A case study details a security assessment performed on an AM system, and presents pro- tocols and recommendations for security best practices for DDM systems. Order the book at www.springer.com.
In addition, CTC’s patent involves using carbon monoxide in an AM process to react with any of 18 different metals. The reaction creates a more complex gas at elevated temperatures, according to a press release, allowing the metal to deposit onto hotter substrates to create the finished part.
16 | 3D METAL PRINTING • FALL 2017
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