America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining have awarded a team led by Guha Manogharan, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, $1.5 million to develop a new approach to casting metal components used in machinery and vehicles. The award comes as a part of a project led by a consortium through the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Manufacturing Technology Program, known as IMPACT 3.0, worth a total of $4.5 million.
Casting refers to the process of solidifying manufacturing components out of molten metal. Despite its importance in producing commercial parts for defense, vehicles, machinery and more, the U.S. has seen a significant decrease in the number of domestic foundries since 2000, according to Manogharan. Effectively implementing additive manufacturing technology - or 3D printing - into casting could help strengthen the U.S.'s manufacturing resilience, Manogharan said.
"At Penn State, we have resources for traditional foundries capable of casting and molding metal into a variety of components, alongside strengths in additive manufacturing," said Manogharan, who also serves as co-director of the Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition. "This project will join these assets - using the digital tools offered by additive manufacturing to improve traditional casting, while greatly enhancing our capabilities for additive manufacturing-augmented casting."
Additive manufacturing technology, which can produce highly complex metal components, has been incorporated into casting before, according to Vittaldas Prabhu, Charles and Enid Schneider Faculty Chair in Service Enterprise Engineering, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and collaborator on the project. Prabhu explained that the team's new approach will offer a novel way of optimizing casting, while providing highly detailed insights regarding possible improvements.
"Casting is well-established, and additive manufacturing is rapidly gaining ground, but turning a foundry into a smart, digital platform is entirely new," Prabhu said. "Our goal is to transform casting into a connected manufacturing service that will not just automate workflow, but enable real-time insights, predictive control and adaptive decision-making across the entire supply chain."
The team's proposed system, known as Digi-FOCUS, will consist of a simulated "digital twin foundry" alongside a physical set of additive manufacturing and casting systems. The digital foundry will model the physical facility in real-time, using advanced data collection and analysis tools to provide researchers detailed information about where casting can be optimized. This data will help researchers better understand the problems hindering the implementation of additive manufacturing in casting processes.
Katie Fitzsimons, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and project collaborator, said that insights taken from prior research will be tremendously helpful in making this project a reality.
"We've made recent technological advancements in robotic systems - like those in Digi-FOCUS - that can reactively learn, even in a complex system environment," Fitzsimons said. "We are excited to use that expertise to advance the digital casting in this project."
Digi-FOCUS will be capable of five different advanced additive manufacturing techniques, including 3D printing using sand, ceramic, polymers, wax and foam, as well as different types of metals, Manogharan explained. In the physical foundry, adaptive robotics systems will help researchers streamline and automate portions of the workflow like inspections and material handling, increasing efficiency. The team will also integrate sensors to additive manufacturing systems to track key information, including printing conditions, metal temperature or the flow velocity of the molten metal, which will then be fed back into the digital twin foundry to create the simulated model.
