Voiceover: Every day, the Advanced Manufacturing Office
at the Department of Energy is working hard to build cooperative partnerships that accelerate
innovation for American manufacturing.
In early 2014, AMO looked to its Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee to collaborate on a revolutionary project that would display
how 3D printing has come of age.
No longer just a table top novelty, 3D printing has moved from prototypes to the real factory
floor.
Jay Rogers, CEO and Co-Founder of Local Motors: The 3D printed car project was really an outgrowth
out of a team that was put together to take on a very difficult challenge.
Lonnie Love, Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
This was a Manhattan-style project.
We had six months to develop a technology to print out a car.
Mark Johnson, Director, Advanced Manufacturing Office, Department of Energy:
This is one of those moments where they came up and said, "We've set a big goal" and they
set the goal.
They said, "failure is not an option on this.
We aren't sure how we are going to get there; we know that it is possible to get there."
Rob Ivester, Deputy Director, Advanced Manufacturing Office, Department of Energy:
We're seeing large-scale additive manufacturing well beyond the scope and scale of anything
that's ever been done before.
Rick Neff, Manager of Market Development, Cincinnati, Incorporated:
It's been an incredibly fast pace of innovation.
Normally a machine tool would take several years to develop.
Craig Blue, Director, Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
This is probably the most aggressive timescale I've ever seen in the evolution of a new product.
Voiceover: It's hard to believe that by fall, this amazing
team effort would succeed in designing and printing a working electric car."
Lonnie Love: The main message of this project is we can
be very, very fast - six months to radically change how we manufacture cars.
It shows the real benefit of having these public-private partnerships - so this project
wouldn't have been possible without AMO's support.
Craig Blue: And this is a new entry of a U.S.-based additive
manufacturing company, so it's a very exciting time.
Voiceover: The industry partners were: Cincinnati Incorporated,
a 115-year old industrial machine manufacturer in Ohio and a Local Motors in Arizona, an
innovative small manufacturer specializing in crowdsourced design and engineering.
The challenge was to develop a large scale additive manufacturing machine using carbon
fiber reinforced plastic to print the car.
Rick Neff: The collaboration to build this car is an
incredible group of talent.
We've got some of the best design capability in the world through the open source design
platform that Local Motors brings to the project.
We've got some of the best minds in additive manufacturing in the world at Oak Ridge National
Lab's MDF.
And we've got one of the best machine tool builders in the world at Cincinnati Incorporated.
Rob Ivester: By bringing the different partners together
as part of the ecosystem, getting them all under one roof and working together as one
team, we're going to see barriers to innovation dropping left and right.
Jay Rogers: But, it is a partnership that is based in
risk taking.
Voiceover: For all the participants in the September
manufacturing demonstration, the significance of what happened, live, layer by layer, in
front of tens of thousands of people in Chicago, cannot be overstated.
Jay Rogers: This team understood that it was bigger than
just 3D printing.
It was about direct digital manufacturing.
So, to them, they were willing to combine the additive manufacturing that was being
built by on the Cincinnati machine and the subtractive manufacturing that's being done
by the large-scale router, and the way in which we are putting these parts together
from various component players - that whole ecosystem made it possible to make it on time.
Rob Ivester: I think this 3D printed car project really
demonstrates the beauty and the power of bringing together disparate elements from a variety
of domains.
Mark Johnson: The partners here have people coming up and
saying, "How do I move this into production in 2014?"
That's pretty practical.
Rick Neff: There's an incredible amount of technology
and expertise involved our national labs, and our national labs are a really good way
to get involved and bring that to small industry to help small business become more competitive.
Mark Johnson: The U.S. manufacturing sector is the most
innovative and productive manufacturing sector in the world.
It's really exciting to see this injection of new technology, and take that to the next
level.
Craig Blue: This is rapid innovation.
This is the way it should be done.
Voiceover: What is the true value of government investments
in advanced manufacturing?
A future that is sustainable, energy-efficient, powered by innovation, and American-made.