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Advanced Manufacturing is the use of innovative technologies to create new or existing products. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s advanced manufacturing portfolio can be organized into four main groups: Additive Manufacturing is the process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing methodologies. Precision Engineering is the design and fabrication of machines, fixtures, and other structure that have exceptionally low tolerances, are repeatable, and are stable over time. Manufacturing Simulation & Automation comprises technologies that reduce human intervention in manufacturing processes, as well as a set of tools that allows for experimentation and validation of product, process, and system designs & configurations. Manufacturing Improvements are inventions that improve throughput/efficiency, or that reduce cost/waste.

Portfolio News and Multimedia

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LLNL licensee, Seurat, with investment from NVIDIA is transforming digital manufacturing

Seurat Technologies, a Massachusetts-based startup, licensed a LLNL-invented metal AM technology in 2015 with the intention of commercializing a high-speed, high-resolution 3D printer to produce metal parts at industrial scale. Since then, Seurat has developed the lasers, optics, and equipment needed to bring the technology to market, further strengthening LLNL’s mission-driven development of advanced materials and manufacturing processes.  In this video, explore how Seurat, with investments from NVIDIA and others, could revolutionize metal additive manufacturing.

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Four LLNL teams to attend Energy I-Corps Cohort 20

In a record setting year for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), four teams of LLNL researchers will attend the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy I-Corps (EIC) Cohort 20 this spring.

The EIC is a key initiative of the DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, and facilitated at LLNL by Hannah Farquar from the Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO). Established in 2015, EIC pairs teams of scientists with industry mentors to train researchers in moving DOE lab-developed technologies toward commercialization.

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LLNL looks to revolutionize 3D printing through microwave technology

Through a new process a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team is calling Microwave Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (MVAM), researchers have introduced an innovative new approach to 3D printing using microwave energy to cure materials, opening the door to a broader range of materials than ever before.

Check out the technology page for MVAM! 

Advanced Manufacturing Technologies

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A digital twin (right) is the virtual representation of real-world objects and processes (left)

LLNL’s novel approach utilizes a number of techniques to improve reconstruction accuracy:

  • Better coding scheme-based techniques
  • Hardware-assisted techniques
  • Adaptive fringe projection techniques
  • Multi-exposure based techniques

The method requires specific calibration procedures and control of the hardware, which is achieved through a digital twin…

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A cold-spray chamber is shown during deposition, with the nozzle at the top of the image and a near-full density sample being fabricated in the center. Particles of the brittle thermoelectric bismuth telluride are accelerated to more than 900 meters per second, or almost Mach 3, in inert gas and directed onto a copper surface, laying down the strips that form the basis of a functioning thermoelectric generator to harvest waste heat. Graphic by Jacob Long/LLNL
Versatile Cold Spray (VCS) enables deposition of brittle materials, such as thermoelectrics, magnets, and insulators, while retaining their functional properties. Materials can be deposited on substrates or arbitrary shapes with no requirement to match compositions. The VCS system is low cost, easily portable, and easy to use. VCS has been developed in a collaboration between Lawrence Livermore…