Title: |
Additive Manufacturing: Opportunities and Challenges |
![]() |
Speaker: |
Prof. Gwenaelle Proust |
|
Affiliation: |
The University of Sydney |
|
When: |
Monday, January 13, 2025 at 2:00:00 PM |
|
Where: |
MRDC Building, Room 4211 |
|
Host: |
Antonia Antoniou | |
Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM), often called the third industrial revolution, enables the economical fabrication of highly customizable components with minimal waste. Unlike traditional subtractive methods, AM builds parts layer by layer using feedstock such as powders, wires, or filaments, allowing near-net-shape manufacturing that reduces assembly needs and overall component weight. Industries such as aerospace, healthcare, automotive, and construction leverage AM for its ability to produce lightweight, intricate parts, rapid prototypes, and durable structures while improving efficiency and sustainability. Despite significant advances over the past decade, challenges remain in enhancing performance and adopting AM for a more sustainable future. This talk highlights AM's transformative potential through three case studies. The first project focuses on upcycling wood waste into wood-plastic composites (WPCs) using fused filament fabrication (FFF), exploring recyclability and mechanical properties after repeated recycling. The second project investigates aluminum alloy (AlSi7Mg) sustainability by reusing powder to reduce waste while maintaining material performance. The third project explores laser powderbed fusion (LPBF) for manufacturing niobium and its alloys, addressing cost and machining challenges by optimizing processing parameters and examining solidification and densification under LPBF's complex thermal conditions. |
||
Biography Gwenaelle Proust is a Professor of Materials Engineering in the School of Civil Engineering and the Academic Director of the Sydney Manufacturing Hub at the University of Sydney. She received her Diploma of Engineering in Materials Science in 1999 from Ecole Polytechnique de Nantes in Nantes, France. She was awarded her ME in 2002 and her PhD in 2005 from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. She then did a two-year post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. She joined the University of Sydney in 2008. Her research aims at understanding the relationships between material properties and their microstructure and to improve material performance, ultimately leading to energy savings and to safer, more efficient devices. Her research projects encompass investigating and modelling manufacturing processes of materials. She also looks at the effects of mechanical deformation on the microstructure evolution of metals, understanding the effects of complex loading on the mechanical response of materials. The experimental aspect of her work is carried out using manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacturing and characterisation techniques such as optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction. She has published over 100 papers to date and has attracted funding via the Australian Research Council Linkage and Discovery schemes. |