On the latest Additive Insight podcast episode, FormAlloy CEO Melanie Lang joins us to discuss Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technology.
Lang founded FormAlloy in 2016, alongside CTO Jeff Riemann, after first becoming interested in 3D printing as a hobbyist.
The co-founders first met as interns at Boeing, and reconnected years later when they spotted an opportunity for DED technology in industries such as aerospace.
Lang herself started out as an aerospace engineer, landing a role at Lockheed Martin after her stint at Boeing, where she was involved in such things as algorithm development for air defence systems. While at Lockheed, she also took part in a three-year leadership programme, which resulted in a master’s degree, and set her on a path that would eventually see her start up her own company.
Throughout the episode, we discuss the product portfolio of that company, how FormAlloy commenced work with the likes of NASA, and what the key opportunities are for DED technology in aerospace and beyond.
When discussing the challenges of making multi-material DED applications a reality, Lang says: "It's all about how do we generate a build or a part that can be trusted, that people are going to trust the integrity of that part. Because otherwise, when you're using some type of functionally graded material, multi material, any type of material concerns that you had, they go up exponentially when you talk about now each layer has a slightly different composition, because we're slowly transitioning from a steel to an Inconel alloy. Finding ways to trust the process either through data or testing would really help that adoption. Because if you can trust what is in the build, I think people will be much more open to try it.
"But right now, they're concerned. They're saying, 'hey, is there any brittle intermetallics that are forming when you put these two materials that don't like each other together?' 'Is there porosity in there?' 'What does the grain structure look like?' 'Where's my part gonna fail?' And all that can be more unpredictable now when you've just introduced a whole host of new materials and compositions throughout a component. So, again, I'll go back to, the data is very important."
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