Graduate Student Seminar

November 03, 2023

12:00 p.m. ET

Scaife Hall 105

Taking Metal Additive Manufacturing to Scale: Research, Entrepreneurship, and Education

Manufacturing of metal products is essential to every major industry, and involves complex supply chains, consumes significant natural resources, and sometimes still uses ancient techniques. Conversely, additive manufacturing (AM) promises to, ultimately, digitize the shaping of components and enable distributed production. I will highlight a parallel trajectory of research, entrepreneurship, and education in AM: computational and experimental techniques for understanding the spreading of powder layers; a new approach for compositionally graded AM combining inkjet printing and laser powder bed fusion (LPBF); industrialization of LPBF at VulcanForms; and digital learning approaches for workforce training at scale.

John Hart, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Hart is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He also serves as Director of the Center for Additive and Digital Advanced Production Technologies and Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity. John’s research focuses on additive manufacturing, materials processing, precision engineering, and computational design. He is a co-founder of Desktop Metal and VulcanForms, and is a Board Member of Carpenter Technology Corporation.

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