The Specialized Materials & Manufacturing Alliance for Resilient Technologies (SM²ART), a partnership between UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), will be featured at the Composites and Advanced Materials Expo (CAMX). CAMX is the largest composites and advanced materials event in North America, and is the premier event for composites research, industry, innovation, educators, and next-generation technology. Join us from 3:00-4:30PM on Wednesday, September 10th, for the “SM2ART Innovation in Action: Scalable Composite Solutions from Nuclear Formwork to Smart Foams and AI” panel. Add to your CAMX schedule here.
ASCC/SM²ART researcher Jason Stevens’ paper, titled “Heated Compression Testing to Reduce Calibration Costs in the Onboarding of Fiber-Reinforced Feedstocks for Large Area Additive Manufacturing via Thermoplastic Extrusion” will be featured at CAMX 2025. Join us from 2:00-2:30PM on Tuesday, September 9th! Add to your CAMX schedule here.
The SM2ART collaboration between U Maine and ORNL has developed both innovative and practical technologies that are reshaping how composites are designed, formed, and deployed across a wide range of industries. From nuclear-grade formwork and large-scale 3D printing to injection-molded wood-fiber composites, smart foams for drones, and AI-assisted troubleshooting, this session delivers a cross-section of innovations that bridge sustainability, scalability, productivity, and performance.
Attendees from the composites, tooling, and advanced manufacturing sectors will gain actionable insights into:
– Rapid, reusable formwork for small modular reactors (SMRs) and industrial construction (SMRs) – More sustainable single-use injection-molded medical device components using wood fibers – Combining process steps using multiplex tooling and multi-material integration – Foam architectures for lightweight structural support for drones – Machine learning to solve shop-floor processing issues
Whether you’re working in consumer products, medical devices, aerospace, construction, nuclear, automotive, or smart infrastructure, this session will surface practical opportunities for collaboration and commercialization.
Heated Compression Testing to Reduce Calibration Costs in the Onboarding of Fiber-Reinforced Feedstocks for Large Area Additive Manufacturing via Thermoplastic Extrusion
Jason Stevens: Tuesday, September 9th, 2:00PM-2:30PM
Large Area Additive Manufacturing (LAAM) has been an emerging area of interest in the composites industry, enabling the rapid prototyping and fabrication of structural components and systems. Increasingly larger platforms for LAAM extrusion have been developed for both research and development as well as commercial end-use purposes, with some available extruder capacities reaching up to 225 kg/hr and print bed platforms up to 29 m in length. Although similar in concepts to smaller scale thermoplastic extrusion equipment, the nuances associated with LAAM extrusion platforms present unique challenges, which are often particular to an individual piece of LAAM equipment. One of the primary challenges related LAAM extrusion methods includes the onboarding and calibration of fiber-reinforced feedstocks. Processing settings, such as screw speeds and material melt temperatures are often found to be unique to a particular piece of extrusion equipment or bead geometry and are not easily translatable between disparate use cases. The University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center has been developing methods to minimize time, effort, and material costs associated with the onboarding and calibrating of fiber-reinforced pellet feedstocks for LAAM thermoplastic extrusion. Compression testing, based on ASTM D695, of injection molded coupons was performed within a heated environmental chamber of a universal testing machine to determine the maximum temperatures at which a LAAM extruded bead of the same material would retain loading capacity to self-support additional print layers. When combined with additional work that was performed to determine the boundaries of the processing envelope of LAAM extrusion parameters, reductions in costs associated with the non-value-added process of onboarding material feedstocks were observed. Initially performed using a pellet-based PA12-glass fiber feedstock on a Cincinnati BAAM, work is underway to extend this process to generalized LAAM extrusion efforts that are equipment agnostic.
Written By: Carter Emerson, carter.emerson@maine.edu Contact: MJ Gautrau, mj@composites.maine.edu
Advanced Structures & Composites Center