$1.8M NSF DMREF Grant Supports Sintering-Assisted Additive Manufacturing Research
Dr. Eugene Olevsky, Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering (pictured above), Dr. Elisa Torresani, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Dr. John Kang, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, are Investigators on the DMERF grant “Accelerating the Adoption of Sintering-Assisted Additive Manufacturing Using Integrated Experiments, Theory, Simulation and Data Science”. This collaborative research synergistically integrates expertise of the investigators at San Diego State University with two other Investigators from Clemson University.
DMREF is the primary program by which NSF participates in the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) for Global Competitiveness. DMREF will accordingly support activities that significantly accelerate materials discovery and development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to advance the design and development of materials with desirable properties or functionality.
The overarching goal of the proposed research, of direct relevance to DMREF, is the development of a new type of experimentally guided and validated multi-scale direct and inverse sintering model considering specifics of micro- and macro-structure in the SAAM processes. The solution of this fundamental inverse sintering problem - enabling the determination of the optimal green state processing conditions; pre-sintering components’ shape, and micro- and macro-structure; and sintering conditions required to obtain the desired shape and microstructure at the end of sintering, - is the ultimate objective of this project.
This project concentrates on two commonly used AM approaches – binder jetting and robocasting . The proposed integration of computation and experiments in a data-driven predictive framework addresses the complex interplay between green state processing conditions and anisotropic microstructure. Constitutive properties will provide fundamental, basic knowledge and a novel practical approach to design and optimize the manufacturing of advanced ceramic systems with programmable macroscopic characteristics and microstructure, - and hence properties and performance.
