Jun 17, 2022 | No Comments | By Sarah Preis
Mark Foster, HEMI fellow and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received funding via the Cohen Translational Engineering Fund to continue development of a sensor that will monitor 3D laser printing in real time with a goal of saving manufacturers time and money.
Foster is lead PI for the project, “SmartAM: A Smart In-Situ Sensor for Metal Additive Manufacturing Qualification and Defect Detection”. His team, consisting of Milad Alemohammad, a postdoctoral fellow, and Steven Storck, a senior materials scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has already created novel, high-speed spectroscopic sensors that can be integrated into laser powder bed fusion printing machines and provide real-time data so operators can correct defective layers as the object is being made.
The sensor was developed at the request of collaborators at JHU APL’s additive manufacturing center. The group also has received $250,000 in seed funding sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and enabled by the MEDE+ AI-M program at the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and has taken part in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program through Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.
Foster plans to use the award from the Cohen Translational Engineering Fund to continue to refine its sensors as well as develop a user dashboard.
