DARPA awards $1.6 million to Penn State for AM research

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Penn State $1.6 million in funding for additive manufacturing research, with Guha Manogharan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D), serving as principal investigator. Manogharan will conduct research through a subcontract with Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

DARPA has awarded a contract, worth up to $6.2 million in funding, to the project titled by the team as ‘One Part And Life (OPAL)’ through DARPA’s Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Endurance (SURGE) program. Manogharan will apply his additive manufacturing expertise and the state-of-the-art machinery available through CIMP-3D to investigate the qualification approach.

While metal AM is garnering widespread industry adoption, traditional approaches of qualifying and certifying printed parts’ stability are expensive and inefficient, requiring researchers to qualify printed parts on a machine-by-machine basis, which significantly slows broader adoption of metal AM for large-scale production. Following current qualification and certification approaches takes years of time-consuming and expensive research, development, and testing.

The goal of SURGE is to improve this process by developing a new approach to assessing individual 3D printed parts’ fatigue performance during printing. According to Manogharan, the approach will accelerate broader adoption of metal AM for functional applications by enabling immediate and unique assessments of fatigue performance of parts printed in any metal AM machine that is in service.

“We are aiming to significantly improve both the prediction accuracy and reduce computing time for estimating service life of metal parts printed with additive manufacturing,” said Guha Manogharan. “If a manufacturer prints a metal part for rapid deployment, we want to predict how long the part will be useful given the conditions of its application. We will be able to accurately predict the defects in the part that impact the fatigue life of a part, or the part life until it needs to be replaced.”

According to Manogharan, this funding will help researchers advance the robustness and efficiency of the metal AM supply chain across the United States.

“Our lab has been leading several efforts in both direct and indirect metal AM for a decade now,” said Guha Manogharan. “This technology could revolutionize the production process for metal parts in defense, aerospace, and a variety of other engineering applications, making it faster and more efficient than ever before.”