Additive manufacturing (AM) has grown significantly over recent years in energy sectors including power generation and oil & gas industries, due to the advantages of supply chain development, economic and performance enhancements, and cost savings. The examples include the high-temperature components in gas turbines, fuel and structural components in nuclear reactors, and corrosion-resistant off-shore drilling components. Compared to other industries, the energy industry has its unique material and process requirements to be able to deploy AM on commercial scale. Large-scale AM is desired to accommodate the size requirement of the energy infrastructure. The cost-effective choices of materials and processes are of greater consideration in power generation and oil & gas industry due to their lower profit margin than aerospace and healthcare industries. More complicated service environments, ranging from high temperature, corrosive conditions to radiation damages, are often seen in different energy systems. Material performance data across a wide range of environments are needed. Beyond the challenging material and process requirements, the full adoption of AM in all energy sectors is hindered by the lack of available codes and standards. To overcome these challenges, it is essential to develop new materials and processes, gather relevant material data, and advance qualification, inspection, and testing technologies. These efforts are necessary to meet the higher demands of materials in energy environments and enable their wide use in various applications.
This symposium invites talks focusing on developing, understanding, and qualifying AM materials and manufacturing processes that target the environments specific to energy sectors, including nuclear fission and fusion, oil and gas, natural gas, coal, solar, and wind, etc. To accelerate industry adoption, we welcome talks from the energy industry to cover code/standard development and industry demonstration. We emphasize this symposium will only accept submissions focusing on energy-specific deployment challenges (e.g., development and qualification, reliability, quality control, scale-up, operating conditions, business demonstration). General AM studies without energy industry specific applications is out of scope.
This symposium will integrate invited and contributed talks in the following categories:
· Advanced AM materials and material architectures for energy industries.
· Advanced AM process research and development for energy industries.
· Material performance and degradation behavior in energy industry environments.
· Qualification of AM materials for energy applications.
· In-situ monitoring and sensing, inspection and qualify control in energy environments.
· Recent progress on code and standard development and industry demonstration of AM in energy sectors.