News

Drs. Yu Jin of SUNY Buffalo and Chen Kan of UT Arlington visited our AMICS Lab this week! Dr. Jin focuses on manufacturing process optimization, and Dr. Kan on sensor-based monitoring and machine learning for AM and smart health. We are looking forward to advancing the next generation of metal AM with you all!

AMICS Lab teamed with Oregon State University and AMET, Inc. to run beam-shaping LPBF trials. Programmable beam profiles (e.g., ring/top-hat, dynamic shaping) can widen the process window, stabilize melt pools, and boost build rates—recent studies and industry reports show multi-fold productivity gains with shaped beams. Our experiments target major throughput increases (aiming for ~30×) while maintaining quality.

Thiraj Wegala received the IISE Manufacturing & Design Division Best Student Paper Award for “In-Situ Porosity Detection in LPBF Using Machine Learning-Augmented Ultrasonic Emissions,” recognized at the IISE Annual Conference & Expo in Atlanta (May 31–June 3, 2025). Congratulations Thiraj, keep up the great work!

We’re finalizing an open-architecture LPBF research platform with two independently addressable lasers and programmable beam shaping—built for rapid scan-strategy studies, in-situ sensing, and closed-loop control. Beam shaping and multi-laser operation can widen the process window, stabilize melt pools, and boost productivity while enabling microstructure tailoring; our open platform exposes full control and monitoring hooks to accelerate AM research.

AMICS Lab teamed with Oregon State University and NIST at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source to conduct in-situ synchrotron diffraction experiments on metal additive manufacturing. Using APS’s ultrabright X-rays—generated by electrons accelerated to ~99.999999% of the speed of light—we probed fast sub-surface physics in L-PBF to advance high-fidelity process understanding.

Dr. Wang was invited to Oregon State University to present AMICS Lab’s work on in-situ monitoring and control for laser powder bed fusion, highlighting recent advances in high-resolution sensing and closed-loop process control for metal AM.

Our team’s paper, “Sub-surface thermal measurement in additive manufacturing via machine learning-enabled high-resolution fiber optic sensing,” is now published in Nature Communications. By embedding chirped-FBG sensors in L-PBF parts and using ML demodulation, we achieve ~30 µm spatial resolution for sub-surface thermal profiles—advancing study of reheating and microstructure evolution in metal AM.

AMICS Lab attended the co-located NAMRC 52 and ASME MSEC 2024 conferences in Knoxville, Tennessee (June 17–21, 2024), where our team was selected as finalists in the Student Manufacturing Design Competition. The conferences brought together researchers, students, and industry partners at the Knoxville Convention Center to share advances in manufacturing science and engineering. Being named a finalist highlights the creativity and rigor of our team’s manufacturing design work.