A team from Binghamton University and Lockheed Martin took first place in a recent Department of Defense competition.

Participants in the Additive Manufacturing for Technology Protection (AM-TP) Consortium were challenged to create a 3D printed object to demonstrate additive manufacturing use for electronics.

The local team included two Lockheed Martin fellows, Steve Gonya and Venugopala Basava, as well as Mark Poliks, professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton, and two of his graduate students, Emuobosan Enakerakpo and Mohammed Alhendi.

The AM-TP competition drew entries from around the country for blind-test evaluation, including imaging analysis and electrical testing. The Binghamton-Lockheed entry achieved the highest overall highest score to win the challenge.

Gonya attended the virtual conference when the winner was announced and was very excited about the decision. “Our team put in a lot of hard work to make this competition article and we developed some very innovative 3D printing techniques along the way to meet the difficult challenge requirements,” he says.

The Lockheed-Binghamton entry was fabricated using stereolithography (SLA), fused deposition modeling (FDM) and an aerosol-jet (AJ) 3D printing method for the electrical components. AJ print technology can deposit micron-sized features of different materials including metals, dielectrics, insulators and resistors.

At the conclusion of this project, the local team demonstrated a functional electronic device fabricated entirely by additive manufacturing methods that won out over the other competitors in a spirted competition between U.S. labs.