UV+EB Industry Thought Leaders

Michael F. Knoblauch, Keyland Polymer Material Sciences, LLC.

Michael Dvorchak, Dvorchak Enterprises LLC

Speaker: Matthew Cassoli, Ford Motor Company

In this webinar, we will review different areas where AM polymer parts are being looked at in the near and far terms at Ford. General features, concerns, and qualification tests will be reviewed for how we evaluate materials as candidates at the early research phases for these applications. The second portion of the webinar will focus on how existing part validation and quality control at Ford will likely apply to AM in the future, including a high level overview of product development component testing and PPAP (production part approval process) activities.

Speaker: Michael J Dvorchak, Dvorchak Enterprises LLC

This webinar reports on the successful proof of concept demonstration of the MicroTau Direct Contactless Microfabrication (DCM) technology for the application of drag reducing riblet microstructures. The DCM technology is designed to be a fast, low-cost, scalable and durable method of directly applying riblets onto an external aircraft surface. Panels produced using the DCM method reliably exhibited a 6-7% viscous drag reduction in wind tunnel testing. We also successfully fabricated novel 3D riblet microstructure designs, confirming the ‘single exposure 3D printing’ capability of the DCM technology. Ongoing is the development of the coating system from which the riblets are fabricated to meet U.S. Air Force (USAF) operational and durability requirements as well as optimization of the optical system for compatibility with a hangar environment. This will be followed by an investigation into automatic applicators to translate the system across the aircraft’s surface.

UV curing is growing in several applications as it can be easily adopted. The properties of the final products can be modified relatively easily since a wide range of materials are available commercially. Even though this technology has numerous advantages and adoption rate is high for various applications it still has some challenges. Few select applications will be focused to bring out the challenges faced. Some of them are monomer/oligomer availability, presence of residual monomer, photoinitiator and its fragments, achieving engineering thermoplastics like mechanical properties with UV cured products, applications in medical industries and in Bioprinting. In this presentation such challenges will be discussed and how it can be used as an opportunity for future products.

Speaker: Jason Rolland, SVP, Carbon
Moderator: Aniruddh Khanna, Applied Materials

The global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing vulnerabilities related to supply chains and what can happen when supply chains are not adaptable. Countries and companies are now increasingly focused on modernizing supply chains to promote versatility and adaptability, and to enable distributed manufacturing so that they can pivot to local-for-local production as and when it’s needed.

Additive manufacturing technologies, like Carbon DLS, are becoming central to this transformation. Carbon SVP of Materials, Jason Rolland, will share insights into how Carbon is enabling medical device companies to quickly pivot in this time of crisis and deliver new/better products to market faster than ever before. Please join us for this webinar as a part of our UV+EB Thought Leaders series.