America Makes TRX Comes to Huntsville
On October 18th and 19th, engineering, scientific, and academic professionals from around the nation converged at the UAH campus for America Makes Technical Review and Exchange (TRX), a conference and networking event centered around the future of advanced manufacturing technologies.
This is the first time the event has been held in Huntsville, with the majority of attendees coming from elsewhere. According to John Wilczynski, Executive Director of America Makes, they had to turn 30-40 people away due to the event reaching capacity.
TRX helps to further cement Huntsville’s reputation as a powerhouse in advanced science and technology, particularly in emerging technologies relating to defense and space exploration.
America Makes, the nation’s leading public-private partnership for additive manufacturing (AM) technology and education, was founded in 2012 as the Department of Defense’s national manufacturing innovation institute for AM and is based in Youngstown, OH. Its members come from industry, academia, government, workforce and economic development organizations and work together to accelerate the adoption of AM and to boost the nation’s global manufacturing competitiveness.
The two-day event, hosted by the non-profit Advanced Manufacturing Innovation and Integration Center (AMIIC) and sponsored by rising star in digital manufacturing General Lattice, featured 17 project presentations in which attendees were encouraged to ask questions to gain a greater understanding of the research underway.
“TRX is all about asking questions. It’s about challenging the speakers and inquiring about their approaches,” Wilczynski told the audience, encouraging them to be active participants throughout the event.
Wilczynski drew comparisons between AMIIC’s focus on the future and the city itself. “If you haven’t noticed, everything in this area is new. I’ve been here a number of times over the course of the ten years of existence of America Makes and each time I come here the city looks completely different. I’m very excited to be here in Huntsville.”
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), AMIIC, located at 5021 Technology Drive, strives to boost North Alabama’s and the nation’s industry through the acceleration of adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies and the further development of a highly-skilled workforce.
AMIIC Executive Director John Schmitt drew attention to the workforce challenges facing industry, noting that Alabama will be approaching a skilled workforce gap of 500,000 by 2025.
Schmitt described advanced manufacturing as a broad description of the intersection of all modern technologies, of which additive manufacturing is a key enabler. He stressed the importance of adopting digital engineering holistically as a community in order to fully take advantage of the different technologies available.
“Additive manufacturing is a critical leveraging, enabling technology that will be and must be important, not only for increased capability for future weapons systems but because of the stress and strain we’ve seen on our supply chain that is a national security threat for future combat,” Schmitt continued.
To leverage the power and promise of advanced manufacturing to radically reduce developmental cycle times and ensure supply chain resilience is a fundamental imperative,” he continued. “We must as an aerospace and defense community fully adopt the entire digital engineering enterprise from inception to demilitarization of our weapon systems.”
Jeramie Broadway, Center Strategy Lead for NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center’s Partnerships & Formulation Office presented the keynote address. Broadway provided an overview of MSFC’s focus on design, development, and integration of complicated space systems.
“We’re always looking for ‘what are the hard things, how do we drive integration and technology and get it ready for space,” Broadway said, noting that MSFC considers itself one of the three main spaceflight centers and serves as the lead for NASA’s SLS program.
Echoing Wilczynski’s statement about Huntsville’s growth and change, Broadway added that Redstone Arsenal is a key player that “helps keep this city thriving to do the next big thing for space, for DoD, etcetera.” He also drew attention to the collaborative nature of the different member agencies of Team Redstone, which frequently work together to solve a variety of engineering challenges.
In his discussion of applications of additive manufacturing to the space program, Broadway stressed NASA’s roles in driving and fostering R&D efforts relating to building better products both on Earth and in the microgravity environment of space, including in-space manufacturing and assembly of large infrastructures in space and surface manufacturing and construction on planetary bodies beyond Earth.
Broadway stated that NASA fully embraces the advantages of additive manufacturing, which include reductions in cost, lead time, and waste; new design and performance opportunities; and rapid design-fail-fix cycles. An added advantage is that many of the technologies developed for space can ultimately be adopted by other industries.
“James Webb is a fantastic display of origami and mechanisms and making things work, but what if we could manufacture a James Webb-sized or larger telescope on orbit and not have to go through the hundreds of single-point failure mechanisms,” he said. “We think that’s the future.”
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