I-Corps: High purity metal additive manufacturing

Award ID: 2025020

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to explore translation for novel metal additive manufacturing (AM) for applications such as antennas, filters, biomedical devices, and aerospace devices. While the current prototype has focused on and shown successful results with copper, the process can be expanded to other highly pure metals, such as aluminum. The proposed technology is a new method of additive manufacturing enabling deposition of highly pure metals in an energy-efficient process with less waste. The largest AM adopter thus far, the aerospace industry, utilizes many 3D printed parts. The proposed project will investigate translational opportunities in aerospace manufacturing. This I-Corps project is based on a novel metal additive manufacturing method, where the material is deposited/printed into the prototype, design, or technology. Existing additive manufacturing technologies have limitations in which alloys can be printed, limiting the product's purity. The proposed technology is a new AM method enabling pure metal printing. It can be used to deposit in any direction (i.e. at any orientation onto a wafer or substrate), beneficial for specific prototype strengths. Each nozzle deposits around a rate of 1 cc/hour. This method also allows for control of porosity at the nanoscale level, allowing for new applications and benefits in areas such as biomedical implants and filtration. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman