Over the course of the next five years, Pratt &Whitney will invest $9 million into the development of powder-based AM technologies to further refine electron beam melting and “laser powder bed” AM.
Unlike other methods of AM, the technologies being developed at the UCONN facility will focus on producing parts that are made of aluminum alloys that can be directly integrated into real-world designs in fields like biomedicine and engine design.
While the collaboration will likely have a serious bias towards pushing the state of the art through research, the interim dean at the UConn School of Engineering, Kazem Kazerounian, believes that the Pratt & Whitney center could be a place for training workers to use AM technology. “Availability of the center on campus would create an opportunity for the students, for the faculty as well as for many a smaller and larger industry in the state of Connecticut to have access to hands on training to use [the printers] on demand for their research activities, for their project activities, and actually to learn, hands on, how to use these machines.”
Watch a video describing the collaboration:
Image and Video Courtesy of Pratt and Whitney