Page 18 - 3D Metal Printing Fall 2019

3D FEATURE
Tackling a Mountain of
AM Challenges in The Rockies
New additive manufacturing education programs and a high-powered consortium position Colorado School of Mines as a 3D printing teaching and research leader. BY LOUIS A. KREN, SENIOR EDITOR
From his office on the cam- pus of Col- orado School of Mines, Craig Brice can survey the sun- drenched mountains and mesas surround- ing Clear Creek Valley in the aptly named city of Golden. The Big Sky landscape suggests unlimited possibilities, as does a major subject of Brice’s focus: additive manufacturing (AM).
As director of the
Manufacturing Program and co-director of ADAPT (Alliance for the Development of Additive Processing Technologies), Brice is charged with helping students, institutions and industry partners capi- talize on the promise of AM. The task is threefold, involving instruction, research and development.
To prepare students for AM careers, and to ensure that employees remain up to date on AM technology and processes,
understanding of the additive process, rela- tionships between properties and the creation of correla- tions between how an AM machine is set up and the material properties that result. With input parame- ters numbering in the hundreds for many machines, how those parameters translate to final properties still isn’t quite known.
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3DMPmag.com
This inhouse-built nonmetal 3D printer at Colorado School of Mines employs a high-speed camera to zero in on the layer-by-layer printing process.
school’s Advanced
Mines, as the university refers to itself, is debuting non-thesis Master of Science and Certificate programs (www.manufac- turing.mines.edu). These educational ini- tiatives grew out of ADAPT, explains Brice.
Collaboration Yields Correlations
“We started ADAPT back in 2016 with a grant from the State of Colorado,” Brice says. “That grant, and establishment of ADAPT, focused on what we saw as a gap in the academic community involving
“You can buy a machine and the machine’s manufacturer can provide settings to run a part,” he continues, “but you really can’t predict the quality of the part coming out of that machine. By encompassing the materials, the design and the data aspects, we think that ADAPT fulfills that full spectrum of what engineers need to know when apply-
ing AM technology in the real world.” Thus arose ADAPT, with the mindset of conducting high-throughput charac- terization, and also employing artificial