Rethinking the Impossible

At its Pulaski County plant, Volvo Trucks North America has utilized 3D printing capabilities to create more than 500 tools and fixtures, saving significant time and more than $1,000 per part.

Speed and efficiency are essential competitive edges for any manufacturing operation. Yet the growing adoption of advanced manufacturing techniques isn’t just boosting efficiency with how goods are produced — it’s changing the types of goods that can be made and where they are produced. Companies are finding that new types of manufacturing technology can deliver levels of precision never before possible, creating safer, more secure, more sustainable, and higher-performing products. In some cases, advanced manufacturing technologies are breaking down barriers to production. And much of this work is advancing as a result of strong collaboration and investment across Virginia. 

A Productive Ecosystem

Additive manufacturing broadly describes the application of raw materials, one layer at a time, to create a finished product. 3D printers are among the most familiar pieces of equipment for additive manufacturing, but these technologies vary widely. In addition to general manufacturing applications, the defense industry is invested in advancing additive manufacturing because the technology promises to revolutionize the speed and strength with which materials are made. Because additive manufacturing adds precisely the amount of material needed to create a finished part, it reduces the amount of raw material required, significantly lowering costs. 

Virginia manufacturers have long put advanced manufacturing solutions to work for themselves, leveraging automation, data collection, and advanced analysis to identify opportunities to enhance production efficiency. Companies across the Commonwealth have benefited from a range of resources that support these advancements. In 2023, the Additive Manufacturing & Advanced Materials (AM2) Tech Hub was launched to formalize collaboration among companies and fuel manufacturing innovation. 

Headquartered in Radford and funded through a federal Tech Hubs Strategy Development Grant, this consortium of more than 50 partners has set its sights on accelerating the growth of manufacturing in the New River Valley and across the southern part of Virginia. “We are bringing together assets and opportunities among private, public, and educational research actors, and helping to tell a bigger story,” said John Provo, executive director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Economic and Community Engagement in Outreach and International Affairs.

Even in its early stages, the AM2 Tech Hub is working to expand the workforce training already underway to develop a pipeline of talent prepared to operate and maintain future advanced factories. Existing solutions include the GO TEC talent pathway initiative introducing middle school students in the New River Valley and throughout southern Virginia to technology and engineering skill sets. 

Manufacturers in the region also enjoy access to graduates of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Advanced Manufacturing department. The school has been recognized as one of the top 20 institutions in the world for additive manufacturing, contributing research to advance industrial applications of metal-based additive techniques. 

Elsewhere, the Virginia chapter of the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education program partners students at Richard Bland College in Prince George County with resources at the nearby Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing and industry partners. These college students gain hands-on experience in advanced manufacturing while completing associate’s degrees as advanced manufacturing technicians. 

And in Danville, workforce development has been accelerated by the launch of the U.S. Navy’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence within the State of Virginia’s Center for Manufacturing Advancement on the Danville Institute for Advanced Learning and Research campus. The center provides a platform for training a skilled additive manufacturing workforce through partnership with the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing program, which provides a fast-track curriculum across key areas, including additive manufacturing.

Increasing Safety for Service Members

The U.S. Army is already putting additive manufacturing technologies to work. The U.S. Department of Defense engaged MELD Manufacturing in Christiansburg to create seamless components for tanks and other vehicles, looking to reduce the vehicles’ vulnerability to explosive devices.  

To remove this weakness, the U.S. Army contracted with MELD to deliver a custom machine capable of printing metal components 20 feet by 30 feet by 12 feet in size. The resulting “Jointless Hull” machine, the world’s largest additive manufacturing apparatus, was designed to print massive metal sheets to serve as seamless tank hulls. 

Emerging technologies are making it possible to work with advanced materials and even produce parts on the go. “The idea that in five or 10 years, submarines are going to go out with the ability to print a part while they’re on patrol is incredible,” Provo said. 

Creating these innovative components requires innovative equipment, and this is where MELD delivers. The company’s machinery uses additive friction stir deposition, a technique that enables printing of metal without melting it to a liquid state. This allows MELD machinery to print in metals like copper and titanium, which would otherwise be unprintable, said MELD CEO Nanci Hardwick. 

Many of these materials are particularly valuable to the aerospace and space industries due to their resistance to wear, corrosion, and heat. These properties, alongside the scale of parts that MELD equipment can deliver, have prompted clients as varied as NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin to adopt MELD’s additive manufacturing technology to produce spacecraft components. 

This equipment also provides manufacturers with a powerful competitive edge. “We’re hearing that customers printing these giant components can save up to two years of lead time,” Hardwick said. “If you just think about the rate of innovation in space and aerospace right now, who can afford to wait two years to get started on the prototype to see if it’s the direction that they want to go with an aircraft or some space component?”

Virginia manufacturers are seeing these additive manufacturing advantages. For Volvo Trucks’ New River Valley plant in Pulaski County, 3D printing capabilities have helped create assembly tools and fixtures that were previously ordered from vendors or machined in-house through a multistep process. Today, the plant uses more than 500 tools and fixtures produced through selective laser sintering (SLS), a type of 3D printing technology that uses a laser to apply heat and pressure to powdered plastic material to form a solid structure. Through SLS, engineers can design a part, program the machine, and leave it to print in a matter of hours. In the case of 3D printing a one-piece diffuser used to clean paint atomizers, the company was able to save more than $1,000 per part. 

Companies are also using additive manufacturing to achieve higher levels of precision in developing complex materials.

“Powder-based metal [additive manufacturing] has a lot of opportunity in small biomedical applications, like hip joints,” Hardwick said. “It gives you the ability to make something very tiny and control all of the geometry because you’re making the part one particle of metal powder at a time. You have a tremendous amount of control, and you can get really intricate.”

Developing Filtration Technology Through Advanced Materials

“While additive manufacturing is often focused on creating three-dimensional solid objects, our technology is focused on creating three-dimensional fibrous structures to improve filtration performance. In some applications, the product is made from multiple layers of different types of fibers,” said Vincent L. Hatcher, director of operations for Floyd County advanced materials manufacturer Hollingsworth & Vose (H&V). 

Whether it’s an air filter in the home or a liquid filter in a factory or the filter within a health care worker’s N95 mask, high-efficiency filtration material is desired for its ability to capture more minute particulates. However, as filter media become more efficient, more energy is required to move air or liquid through the filter. This is where H&V uses advanced nanofiber manufacturing techniques to develop materials capable of increasing filtration efficiency while resolving the pressure issues. 

The company operates a research and development lab and two filtration media production sites in Floyd County and is undergoing a $40 million expansion that will give it space to “push the limits in terms of new production development,” Hatcher said. 

Because advanced manufacturing strategies prioritize efficiency and waste reduction, many companies see these processes as instrumental in moving manufacturing toward a more sustainable future. Companies like Monoflo International, the Winchester-based manufacturer of injection-molded reusable transport packaging, are using advanced processes to reprocess packaging scrap. The company’s dedicated reprocessing and recycling operation breaks down as much as 15 million pounds of broken or obsolete high-density polyethylene (HDPE) material each year.

Reengineering this material in-house gives the company control over material quality and provides customers with pricing stability by detaching from the volatility of the petrochemical product market. Similarly, Amcor’s facility in Wytheville develops bottles for PepsiCo that are made from up to 100% recycled content. Its investments in advanced solutions that avoid coupling unrecyclable materials in its products ensure its polyethylene terephthalate bottles are fully recyclable.

The Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education program from Richard Bland College and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing trains students on advanced manufacturing skills.

Getting Materials From the Source  

Manufacturers aren’t just developing advanced products in Virginia — they’re also developing essential materials that allow partners to innovate. For example, Luna Labs in Charlottesville helps government labs and companies in the defense and health care industries explore development of advanced materials and manufacturing processes. From advanced composites to specialized coatings and textiles, the company is solving defense engineering challenges for critical industries, including a contract research division funded through federal Small Business Innovation Research awards. 

“The core of our company started as that research arm and funds a large part of our R&D,” said Drake Goolsby, Luna Labs’ chief commercialization officer. “We use that as a foundation for delivering solutions that match up to those government applications.”

Major manufacturers have found that a Virginia location suits their business needs. DuPont opened its Spruance plant in Chesterfield County to produce Rayon® fiber, and the facility, which remains the company’s largest in the world, now includes production lines for numerous key materials. The site is also now home to chemical manufacturer Celanese Corporation, which recently acquired the production capabilities and assets of DuPont’s Materials and Mobility division to support the growth of its engineered materials business.

Among Virginia’s strengths in advanced manufacturing is an abundance of both building-block chemicals and specialty chemicals used in downstream manufacturing, particularly polymers, coatings, and additives like those supplied by the Evonik Corporation, a German specialty chemicals manufacturer with a plant in Hopewell and a facility in Chesterfield County. These raw materials are used as feedstock for intermediary products with many industrial, commercial, and consumer end use applications.

In Southampton County, Eastman Chemical is developing specialty polymers for use in additive manufacturing applications ranging from fibers to consumer electronics. In Halifax County, IperionX is putting the finishing touches on a facility to house the first commercial-scale operation to turn titanium scrap into metal powder to produce components via additive and other advanced manufacturing processes. The facility will help shift U.S. manufacturers away from reliance on imports of titanium sponge, the raw material used to develop titanium alloys essential for aerospace and defense production. 

“Our business is about making U.S.-made, sustainable, low-cost, high-performance titanium products for critical and commercial industries,” said Taso Arima, IperionX’s managing director and CEO. 

Titanium offers the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal, is highly corrosion resistant, and has the ability to withstand extreme temperatures. Yet the United States has no domestic titanium sponge production and has long sourced almost all of its metal from Japan, with the global supply chain dominated by China and Russia, Arima said. As U.S. manufacturers look to source more materials closer to home, advanced manufacturing is proving essential for stabilizing supply chains. 

As Arima points out, advanced manufacturing materials and technologies are a “tool in the toolbox. It’s not a full method for bringing back everything. You have to have innovation across the supply chain,” he said.