Facilities and Infrastructure | CAMAL

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Facilities and Infrastructure

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CAMAL is a leading US manufacturing education and research center located in Fitts-Woolard Hall, a new state-of-the-art facility on NC State’s Centennial Campus in Raleigh, NC.

The three major research components of the center are:

  1. Additive Manufacturing
  2. Advanced Manufacturing and Machining
  3. Materials Development and Characterization

Additive Manufacturing

CAMAL currently has metal additive manufacturing systems dedicated to new materials development, geometry design, alloy development and in-situ process monitoring and control. Our powder bed fusion (PBF) systems range across multiple beam powers, wavelengths and energy sources. These include Laser-based systems:

  • EOS M290 (400W)
  • M280 (200W)
  • Concept Laser M100R (100W)
  • Xact Metals XM200C (100W, installed in Fall 2023 with build areas ranging from 8in x 10in to 4in x 4in.

Additional AM capabilities include:

  • Arcam 5kW electron beam (EB) PBF machines (S12, A2, A2X, and Q10 models)
  • Freemelt ONE EB-PBF w/ 6kW source.
  • A Desktop Metals binder jet printer is also available for research.

Additionally, CAMAL also has over 20 polymer printing machines ranging from filament FDM, polymer powder bed, selective laser sintering (SLS), UV cured jetting and stereolithography utilizing printers from manufacturers like Stratus, Bambu, Objet, FUSE, HP, Mark Forge and Rapid Shape among others. This flexibility allows us to quickly optimize designs for testable structures over a wide range of materials and rapid prototype new designs.

Advanced Manufacturing and Machining

Metal Powder Atomizer

New alloy development is performed on an Arcast pilot scale gas atomizer with four melt modes: utilizing plasma and induction with a batch size typically 1 – 3 Kg per run, which is well matched for R&D size requirements.

CAMAL also has an advanced machine shop with:

  • HAAS VF 2 Vertical Machining Center
  • HAAS VF 3ssyt Vertical Machining Center
  • Mazak Integrex i-100ST
  • HAAS Multigrind CA 5-Axis Grinding Center
  • Citizen Machinery Cincom L20
  • AME C1000 Friction Stir Welder
  • Mitsubishi FA10S CNC Wire EDM
  • Ametek Creaform Laser Scanner
  • Zeiss Coordinate Measuring Machine(CMM)
  • Mitutoyo Quick Scope QS-L2010Z/AFC

Materials Develop and Characterization

Powder characterization includes Hall Flowmeter, a Quantchrome Autotap™, Microtrac S3500 Particle Size Analyzer and Hirox KH-7700 digital microscopy.

Material chemistries are analyzed with inert gas fusion (LECO, OHN) and ThermoScientific ARL XPerform WD-XRF. Density is measured with a Quantachrome MicroUltrapyc 1200e gas pycnometer, phase formation by TA Instruments DSC/TGA ST650, Vicker’s hardness on LECO MHT Series 200, vibration analysis using a Polytec PSC-500-HV, mechanical strength using an ATS load frame w/ 20klb load cell and 2 TestResources fatigue and Admet eXpert 9310 rotating beam fatigue machines.

Advanced materials characterization facilities are provided by NCSU AIF/MSE (https://www.aif.ncsu.edu/ ), including:

  • SEM: JEOL 6010LA, ThermoFisher Scientific Helios Hydra p-FIB
  • Hitachi SU8700 and SU3900VP-SEM, (among others)
  • TEM: ThermoFisher Talos F200X & Titan 80-300

Additional characterization capabilities include:

  • Zeiss Xradia Nano CT, PANalytical Empyrean XRD
  • ION TOF-SIMS5 Ion Mass Spectrometer
  • XPS/UVS-SPECS
  • Asylum MFP-3D classic Atomic Force Microscope (AFM)

Theese are used for comprehensive microstructure and materials characterization across multiple size scales.