Penn State names Allison Beese co-director of AM centre

Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania, USA, has announced that Allison Beese, associate professor of materials science and engineering, will serve as co-director of the Center for Innovative Materials Processing through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D).

“This is a really exciting time to be working in Additive Manufacturing and I’m honoured to step into this position, joining Ted Reutzel and Tim Simpson on the CIMP-3D leadership team to help push forward the great work in this field that’s already happening at Penn State,” Beese stated.

CIMP-3D operates and maintains a state-of-the-art processing laboratory that can process these materials and unites experts from across disciplines in the College of Engineering, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the Materials Research Institute and the Applied Research Laboratory.

“At Penn State, we have experts working in every aspect of Additive Manufacturing, from design to process planning, in-situ process monitoring and control-to-part characterisation,” Beese added. “From a materials standpoint, we have people working on all materials classes currently used in AM, as well as people designing new materials and methods to push the technology forward.”

Beese has stated that her goals as co-director include bringing the community together to pursue multidisciplinary research opportunities, and ensure growth in emergent areas, particularly related to advanced materials – for example, the development of ceramic materials for use in hypersonics, the use of machine learning for Additive Manufacturing process improvement and the design and fabrication of functionally graded materials.

“I think we can keep pushing boundaries on cutting-edge research by bringing the community together to create new teams and synergies,” Beese said. “This will enable us to approach even bigger problems and continue to expand CIMP-3D’s reach in the AM community.”

Beese also serves as Director of the Additive Manufacturing and Design (AMD) programme at Penn State and stated that her dual rioles with the graduate programme and CIMP-3D can provide a bridge linking students with research opportunities.

Her research group focuses on identifying the effect of microstructure on macroscopic mechanical behaviour, namely deformation and fracture. They use a range of methods, including experimental characterisation, in-situ process monitoring, machine learning and computational simulations to identify processing-structure-property linkages in Additive Manufacturing.

Thus far, her team has made advancements in understanding how internal defects in additively manufactured metals impact their failure behaviour, providing an understanding necessary for part qualification and the safe adoption of AM. They have also developed methods for characterising and designing functionally graded materials made by Additive Manufacturing, material in which the composition and, therefore, properties vary spatially within a component for enhanced performance, for example high strength and corrosion resistance.

Allison Beese received her bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Penn State. She then worked as an engineer at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory before entering graduate school where she earned her masters of science and doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Penn State in 2013, she held a post-doctoral appointment at Northwestern University. Beese’s work has received a number of awards, including the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society AIME Robert Lansing Hardy Award, a National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award and the International Outstanding Young Researcher in Freeform and Additive Manufacturing Award.

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