Wire co-extrusion with big area additive manufacturing

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility is developing a system that will deposit and embed conductive and resistive elements within a printed bead of material. The system was implemented on a Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) system using a co-extruding nozzle. It has already been demonstrated that BAAM is useful for the tooling industry, but this could be a great improvement on an established application of BAAM parts. This system will provide the ability to control and monitor the surface of additively manufactured (AM) parts. It will also enable self-heating surfaces of AM parts, which is particularly useful in tooling applications. This system could even be used in the future for embedding other materials not found in pellet form in BAAM parts. This work will cover the development of the co-extrusion system and its integration with the dual-port nozzle and the BAAM system.