Manufacturing of metal components is essential to every major industry, and involves complex supply chains, consumes significant natural resources, and in some cases still uses ancient techniques. Conversely, additive manufacturing (AM) promises to, ultimately, digitize the formation of objects, consolidate supply chains, and redistribute value across the product life cycle. I will provide an overview of AM techniques for metals, and will highlight recent work from my research group at MIT as well as from the startup company Desktop Metal, including: discrete element simulation and X-ray metrology of powder spreading; a new concept for drop-on-demand metal printing; and an extrusion-based process that enables metal 3D printing in ambient followed by high temperature sintering. These efforts emphasize expertise in materials, computation, and automation, which are collectively critical to enabling metal AM at scale. Yet, from industry, we have learned that in some cases the greatest barriers to wider adoption of AM are limited knowledge of its technical foundations, and the difficulty of quantifying its value proposition. Motivated by this, I will also share experiences from the development of professionally oriented courses focused on AM, and the launch of a new consortium aiming to strengthen ties between MIT and industry in additive and digital manufacturing.

John Hart, MIT Mechanical Engineering