Session: Rising Stars of Mechanical Engineering Celebration & Showcase

Paper Number: 150189

150189 - Development of Scalable and Expeditious Additive Manufacturing (Seam): A Solution to High Production Additive Manufacturing 

For the past 40 years, metal additive manufacturing (AM) technologies with the capability of fabricating highly complex metal components with virtually no geometrical limitations, has enabled new opportunities in product designs and performance, reducing total cost and shortening lead time, improving material efficiency and creating more sustainable products. A significant attention and interest of manufacturing industry lies on where metal AM can replace or improve production capability of traditional manufacturing (TM). While metal AM processes are capable of providing individually designed product with a high level of details, TM processes with their fast, precise, and efficient production in combination with the long-established, quality assured, and widely implemented manufacturing techniques makes the competition incredibly difficult for AM when it comes to high volume production.

As metal AM field evolves with an increasing demand in highly complex and customizable product, there is a critical need to fill in the gap in terms of production speed between metal AM and TM processes. This poster will cover the development of the scalable and expeditious additive manufacturing (SEAM) process, which hybridizes binder jet printing and stereolithography principles, capitalizes on their advantages to produce a new metal AM processing route. The SEAM process is not only suitable for high production environment but also capable of fabricating components with excellent accuracy and resolution. Once fully developed, the process is well suited to bridge the productivity gap between metal AM and TM processes, making it an attractive candidate for further development and future commercialization as a solution to high production AM.

This poster presents the processing of Haynes 214, a nickel-based superalloy, using the SEAM process. The mixture consisted of Haynes 214 powder and liquid UV curable polymer was selectively photopolymerized on a modified powder bed system in a layer-by-layer fashion. The printed three-dimensional green objects were then subjected to appropriate thermal treatments for binder removal and high temperature sintering to attain final metallic parts with relative density of above 99.5%. The SEAM process demonstrated its capability of fabricating fully dense metal parts with homogeneous microstructure and free of residual stress, significant advantages over other beam-based metal AM processes. Additionally, with its simplicity in design and affordable printing system, as well as scaling feasibility, SEAM process has great potentials in reducing manufacturing time and cost, making it a suitable and attractive manufacturing method for applications with high temperature superalloys. Moreover, with the unique ability to join multiple green parts together by co-sintering, the SEAM process can provide an elegant solution for applications that require creating enclosed channels and internal features within a part. SEAM process was successfully employed to produce the prototype heat exchanger assembly with internal fins structures and heat flow channels by co-sintering two separate green heat changer plates together.

Presenting Author: Haseung Chung Michigan State University

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Haseung Chung is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU). Before he joined the Michigan State University in 2017, Dr. Chung was a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan (UM) and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and System Design Engineering at Hongik University in Korea. Dr. Chung received his B.S. (1998) and M.S. (2000) degrees from Seoul National University in Korea. He completed his Ph.D. degree in 2005 at UM and continued to work as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow until 2006. Dr. Chung’s professional interests and recent research include developing new additive manufacturing processes, magnetic-field assisted finishing (MAF), optimizing additive manufacturing for bio-medical applications, cyber manufacturing systems, etc. Dr. Chung has led various projects funded from NSF, DOE, ONR, NIH, and several industries as PI or Co-PI. He is awardee of 2023 NSF CAREER and 2019 Hanwha Q CELLS & Advanced Materials Non-Tenure Faculty Award. He has published about 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has been serving as an associate editor for three different peer-reviewed journals (Journal of Manufacturing Processes, International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing- Green Technology, Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology).

Authors:

Haseung Chung Michigan State University
Zhiyuan Qu Michigan State University
Patrick Kwon Michigan State University