• Dr. Karen M. B. Taminger
  • NASA Langley Research Center
  • 104D Surge Building
  • 4:00 p.m.
  • Faculty Host: Dr. Rakesh Kapania

This lecture is intended to introduce the world of materials engineering and how this knowledge helps us manufacture airplanes, spacecraft and other useful objects.  It will focus on an additive manufacturing process called “Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication (EBF3)”.  We have been developing this process for ten years at NASA Langley, and it provides a good example of how an idea can be brought to reality and even demonstrated in zero gravity.  The EBF3 process uses a focused electron beam in a vacuum environment to create a molten pool on a metallic substrate; then translated while metal wire is fed into the pool.  A part is thus built directly from a CAD drawing in a layer-additive fashion.  Because this is a layer-additive process, metal can be placed only where it is needed and the material chemistry and properties can be tailored throughout a single-piece structure.  This allows new design methodologies such as integrated sensors, tailored structures, and complex, curvilinear stiffeners to be designed to support loads and perform other functions such as aeroelastic tailoring or acoustic dampening.  All of this is made possible with modeling and simulation.  This seminar will follow the maturation of the EBF3 technology from inception to commercialization and will describe how a manufacturing process can influence future aircraft designs by providing a solution that enables multidisciplinary optimization.