What if a nearly 600-pound hydraulic structure could be manufactured in only 27 hours?
Lucy Slattery, an engineer with ERDC’s Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory, joins the Power of ERDC podcast to explain how ERDC researchers are using large-scale additive manufacturing to build complex components for physical modeling, prototyping and engineering research.
Slattery describes how the team printed a one-tenth-scale, carbon-fiber-reinforced miter gate for the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory. The gate will be finished, instrumented and installed in a water tank, where researchers will use the physical model to validate computational predictions of flow and structural performance.
Topics discussed include the potential of large-scale additive manufacturing (1:14), material selection (5:08), and the expertise required to go from a digital design to a finished component (7:45). We also talk about how this capability can accelerate research and engineering decisions (13:15), research to overcome current technical limitations of large-scale additive manufacturing (17:54), how industry partners strengthen this capability (21:40), and a current effort to 3D-print a paddlefish to support physical modeling efforts (25:50).
Watch a video of this episode at PowerofERDCPodcast.org/76-printing-big_video.
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