ADDITIVE POWERHOUSE Meet the innovators leading the charge in AM

Amid the swell of congratulatory remarks –words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘awesome’ complementing the likes and love hearts on social media posts – one comment stands out: “A powerhouse group of super innovators.”

The words were left under a post about the five people on the front cover of this very magazine; our finalists for this year’s TCT Women in 3D Printing Innovator Award.

Now in its third year, our annual call to the public to nominate female innovators who are leading the charge in additive manufacturing (AM), collected more nominations than ever before. And after much deliberation between TCT and Women in 3D Printing, our nominees gathered at the TIPE 3D Printing Conference in January – converged across time zones and industries – to discuss their journeys into AM and how they’re each championing the technology today.

The Additive Entrepreneur

Kate Black is a multidisciplinary researcher and Professor of Manufacturing at the University of Liverpool, focused on elevating the AM industry through chemistry and collaboration. A strong advocate for a more diverse workforce to “create innovation in manufacturing,” Dr Black is also a campaigner for greater diversity in the STEM workforce. In 2013, she founded LivWISE (Liverpool Women in Science & Engineering) to support and promote women in STEM.

But Dr Black is also an entrepreneur. In 2019, she co-founded the university spin-out Meta Additive Limited, which was later acquired by Desktop Metal.

It was Dr Black’s background in chemistry that enabled the development of a new approach to 3D printing metals that found its roots in atomic layer deposition and chemical vapour deposition, to address the limitations of metal binder jetting. That, plus a strong team made up of collaborators from different industries and backgrounds, as Dr Black shared.

“Having a great technology is only part of it and it's only part of [getting it] to commercialisation,” she elaborated.

“Really, it's all about people and team. And if you don't have the right people in the right team, great innovation can get squashed. So, for me, it was that synergy of having a good technology but also having a great team to take it to market.”

The technology itself utilises non-sacrificial functional binders to eliminate challenges around porosity, shrinkage, size limitations and production speeds associated with current binder jetting processes. With this novel chemical approach, translating organometallic expertise into additive manufacturing, and specialising in materials, Dr Black says the aim is to broaden the palette of materials that can be processed with AM.

“I think that allowed me to come at it from a different angle,” Dr Black explained. “I'm a real firm believer that, particularly in manufacturing and additive manufacturing, we need to take people from all the seemingly disparate disciplines, so people from chemistry or physics or biology, and see what they do to turn it on its head, because to me, everything is about materials. If you don't have the materials, you can have the most amazing machines, you can have amazing software but if you don’t have the materials to put into it, then you're not going to manufacture anything.”