ITAMCO Team Receives Funding for AM Support Structures Project
America Makes has awarded R&D funding to a team consisting of ITAMCO, Johnson & Johnson, and two universities.
America Makes, a division of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, has awarded R&D funding to a team consisting of Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies (ITAMCO), Johnson & Johnson, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Pittsburgh. The team is one of nine groups to receive funding through the Institute’s third project call. America Makes will provide up to $8 million in funding toward these projects with $11 million in matching cost shared by the awarded project teams for total funding worth $19 million. The goal of America Works is to help the participants commercialize the results of their work.
The ITAMCO group’s project is titled “Parametric Design of Functional Support Structures for Metal Alloy Feedstocks.” Its mission is to codify the design rules for support structures used in direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) and to inform and then automatically recommend the optimal part orientation and designs for optimized supports. The members of the group developed the award proposal together and will divide the work as follows:
- The University of Notre Dame will provide the algorithms for modeling
- Johnson & Johnson will provide medical implant models for optimization
- The University of Pittsburgh will provide testing on their DMLS equipment
- ITAMCO will write the plug-in application for Autodesk
The proposed completion date for the project is January 2017. At that time, ITAMCO will begin working with Autodesk to bring the application to market.
