Topic
Additive manufacturing covers 3D printing across metals, polymers, and composites, from materials and process development to qualified, repeatable production.
ORNL says its 3D-printed composite forms cut lead time for specialized nuclear concrete molds from about six months to about two weeks. The forms are in full-scale demonstration on the Oak Ridge campus where Kairos Power is building its Hermes reactor.
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Engineers at RMIT and in France made open-cell titanium lattices float in seawater for two weeks by filling their hollow struts with polyurethane foam. Their rule for predicting whether a flooded lattice floats applies beyond this foam, though two weeks at sea is a short durability test.
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Concordia engineers 3D-printed impact-absorbing structures from lunar soil simulant and PEKK plastic recycled three times without significant degradation. It is an early lab step toward making lander parts on the moon from local dust and reused polymer.
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Florida State chemists used UV light to crosslink metal halide hybrid films that stay intact in water, where uncrosslinked films quickly dissolved. That removes one processing barrier for X-ray scintillators, though no detector performance figures were reported.
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Lawrence Livermore researchers say a 3D-printed bioreactor turns methane into succinate over 10 times better than liquid systems while using less power. The account does not define the tenfold metric, and at 1 liter the reactor is still a lab device meant eventually for small landfill and wastewater sites.
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The Army's brushless motor line at Tobyhanna Army Depot was just over two weeks old when its motors carried a printed Group 1 drone about 300 miles in the California desert. Whether industry can buy them is another matter.
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The Series B, led by Inflection Equity, pays for more CBAM 25 units, deployments and service staff. Three of the four named recipients so far are research or university organisations, and the performance figures are the company's own.
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The printers are already installed at Savannah River's Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative. That leaves the research money aimed at nickel superalloys and radiation-tolerant metals, which is where parts suppliers will meet the reviewers.
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