Seurat Technologies Selected for HPC4Mfg Award

Seurat was among 13 firms selected by the High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4MFG) Program and will receive U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funding for its project titled: "Reduce Spatter during Laser Powder Bed Fusion". The nearly $3.8 million from DOE for the 13 projects is designed to stimulate the use of high performance supercomputing in U.S. manufacturing. The thirteen new project partnerships include application of world-class computing resources and expertise of the national laboratories including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. These projects will address key challenges in U.S. manufacturing proposed in partnership with companies and improve energy efficiency across the manufacturing industry through applied research and development of energy technologies. Each of the thirteen newly selected projects will receive up to $300,000 to support work performed by the national lab partners and allow the partners to use HPC compute cycles. For a full list of project descriptions, please visit: https://hpc4mfg.llnl.gov/projects-round5.php

Specifics of Seurat's project summary are at: https://hpc4mfg.llnl.gov/projectsround5/seurat.php (below).

Topic: Reduce Spatter during Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Summary: Metal additive manufacturing is growing rapidly and is of immense interest worldwide to decrease weight, increase functionality and improve manufacturing efficiency. Laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (PBFAM) printers from today’s market leaders routinely make high-value parts. However, today’s machines also suffer from low productivity and have major quality problems largely due to spatter, defects, and residual stress. Seurat’s novel printers operate by area printing enabling a high degree of spatial-temporal laser intensity control. Careful tuning of thermal history can lead to minimal spatter, ability to control microstructure, and decreased residual stresses. We propose to use high-speed video, material analysis and multiphysics modeling to characterize the effects of the interaction between the lasers and powder and to elucidate the underlying physics. Simulation guided advancements to Seurat’s area AM printing can impact energy-related technologies such as light-weighted vehicles, heat exchangers, inventory reduction and novel high-performance parts.

Preliminary experiments at Seurat with minimal ejecta

Principal Investigator: James DeMuth, Seurat Technologies

National Lab Partner: Manyalibo Matthews, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory