SME Additive Manufacturing Awards Celebrate Innovation

SME announces the winners of its Additive Manufacturing Industry Awards, which were presented at RAPID + TCT 2022, in May at Detroit's Huntington Place.

The awards were presented by SME's AM Technical Community Leadership Committee and Direct Digital Manufacturing Advisory Team. The Additive Manufacturing Industry Awards celebrate the accomplishments of individuals, teams and companies creating impact in commercializing AM.

SME's AM Technical Community Leadership Committee predates the formation of RAPID + TCT. It originally was created in 1992 by the Rapid Prototyping Association (RPA), which joined the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) one year later to become the Rapid Prototyping Association of SME (RPA/SME). It later was renamed SME's Rapid Technologies & Additive Manufacturing Community Advisors before eventually becoming what it is today. I

All three of the awards, which traditionally are presented at RAPID + TCT, are focused on the application of AM technology to production. This year's Additive Manufacturing Community awards include the following:

AM Industry Achievement Award

The AM Industry Achievement Award, established in 2008, was developed to recognize an individual or team for outstanding accomplishments that have had impact in the application of AM in any industry. The award recognizes achievements that have been implemented or deployed in a commercial/industrial environment rather than research investigative work. The 2022 recipient is:

Slade Gardner, PhD, president and founder of Big Metal Additive, is SME's 2022 AM Industry Achievement Award winner. Image courtesy of SME.

Name: Slade Gardner, PhD
Title: President and Founder
Business Affiliation: Big Metal Additive

Dr. Gardner is recognized for his contributions over a distinguished career for advancing industrial metal additive manufacturing, and for his recent work with large-scale metal-hybrid AM. Throughout his career he has invented, developed, and transitioned materials, equipment, and processes for a multitude of large additive-manufacturing capabilities.

Aubin AM Case Study Award

The "Aubin AM Case Study Award" looks to recognize innovations in application of AM technologies. The purpose of the award is to recognize outstanding use cases of AM adoption and implementation and to provide inspiration to others in their journey of AM application. Winning for their topic, "Laying the Groundwork for Industrial 3D-Printed Parts in Oil & Gas Applications," the recipients are:

VELO3D 

IMI Critical Engineering

Digital Manufacturing Challenge

The 2022 Digital Manufacturing Challenge is a call to action to inspire the next generation of engineers. They are challenged to rethink ways to design, create, and utilize infrastructure-level systems that deploy engineering design and manufacturing solutions to strengthen infrastructure in the response, mitigation and/or prevention of such disruptive and devastating events and envision an optimistic view of healthy, robust, sustainable, smart, agile, peaceful communities. Winning for their topic, "Hybrid Wire-Arc Additive Manufacturing of Topology Optimized Aviation Components," the recipients from Virginia Tech are:

Daniel Chirvasuta 

Nathanael High 

Matthew Martin 

T. Benjamin Nguyen 

Omkar Shinde 

Nicolas Tomanelli

Faculty advisors included Christopher Williams, PhD, and PhD student Sam Pratt, with assistance from industry advisor Dan Braley, CAM-T, Associate Technical Fellow & Additive Manufacturing Technical Focal of Boeing Global Services.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.