US Air Force: Advanced Manufacturing Olympics Finalist

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

US Air Force: Advanced Manufacturing Olympics Finalist
Using some of the modeling and experimental efforts from two papers we previously published we entered the Advanced Manufacturing Olympics (AMO) hosted by the U.S. Air Force.

Since the competition was only for American teams, we partnered with The Barnes Global Advisors (TGBA) to apply for the Materials Hurdles challenge within the Olympics, For this application, we created a joint team video alongside a team resume that was selected for the competition and we are now one of the 10 finalist teams competing for the event.

With the help of Dr. Kevin Slattery and Mr. John Barnes from TBGA, we decided to work with Scalmalloy - an aluminum alloy specially designed for additive manufacturing on July 31st itself to kick off the proceedings. We received the powders for this exotic alloy on August 12 and completed the entire chain of process parameter optimization, printing components, and the marketing videos within a week to ship samples out on August 19. 

The AMO judges are currently testing our components and the marketing team is working towards using videos from all teams to create a virtual event running October 20-23, 2020 -  when the final winners will be announced. We intend to showcase the technology developed in our lab in the Innovation Playground during the event. 

Story Submitted by Sagar Patel