Record attendance, a new venue layout, and a slate of first-time competitors converged in Reno to reveal how additive manufacturing is crossing the threshold from clever prototypes to certifiable production, and the most telling proof came from processes aimed squarely at industry’s hardest roadblocks. Over four days, the AMUG Technical Competition put a spotlight on solutions that did not just dazzle on a show floor; they demonstrated verification, repeatability, and a path to scale. REM Surface Engineering topped Finishing & Post-Processing with a chemical method that rescues sealed metal channels once considered unsalvageable, while B9Creations led Advanced Concepts by shrinking elastomer molding into the microscale with off-the-shelf materials. Notably, REM also earned Members’ Choice, a peer nod that carried the weight of shop-floor pragmatism as much as technical flair.
Competition Overview
Event and Judging
AMUG’s committee chair, Corey Wardrop, underscored that this year delivered several firsts: refreshed categories, a new display flow that improved side-by-side evaluation, and a large cohort of first-time entrants bringing fresh perspectives from labs and factories. Twelve AMUG DINOs—veterans recognized for outstanding service—served as judges, pairing domain expertise with an insistence on execution, reproducibility, and clarity of evidence. Their process balanced creativity against disciplined validation, while member voting added a second lens: what practitioners value when timelines are tight and parts must pass inspection. The convergence of expert scoring and community endorsement notably elevated REM’s entry, revealing alignment between technical merit and production needs.
Categories and Criteria
Two tracks framed the competition: Finishing & Post-Processing and Advanced Concepts. The former rewarded methods that transform as-printed parts into production-ready components without sacrificing dimension or surface integrity, while the latter recognized process innovations pushing boundaries of materials, feature size, and integrated workflows. Entrants were judged on originality, practicality, and the rigor of their proof—CT scans, process controls, and comparative data carried weight over showmanship. Winners received complimentary admission to AMUG 2027 to report progress, a deliberate mechanism to stress continuity, not one-off demos. That commitment signaled a bias toward solutions that can be stood up in regulated industries, withstand audits, and hold up across lots, machines, and operators.
Winners and Technical Highlights
Finishing & Post-Processing
REM Surface Engineering, led by Dr. Joshua Boykin, introduced a selective chemical declogging process that extracts sintered, trapped powder from fully enclosed passages in metal powder-bed parts while preserving thin-walled features. High-resolution X-ray CT verified near-complete clearance and geometry retention, restoring flow through intricate TPMS heat exchangers where mechanical methods fail or break delicate lattices. The chemistry targets bonded powder without etching parent material, and the workflow threads into production with fixtures, rinse protocols, and traceability steps aligned to aerospace expectations. Co–second-place entries reinforced the range of finishing: HellermannTyton’s Fallout-inspired Pip-Boy replica illustrated how finishing elevates electronics-laden consumer props to metallic realism, while Sandia’s PBF-LB 316L study tied ultra-thin limits to residual stress and used modified builds plus vacuum annealing to reach 400-micron sections.
Advanced Concepts
B9Creations, led by Ethan Hartmann, showcased micro-scale, platinum-cure silicone components molded via soluble sacrificial tooling printed with high-resolution DLP. By co-optimizing print resolution, tooling geometries, venting, and silicone pot life, the team achieved reliable fill, controlled shrink, and repeatable features measured in the low hundreds of microns—territory that frustrates conventional molding. Crucially, the approach relied on commercially available silicones and a dialed-in post-cure, making transfer to microfluidics, soft robotics, and miniature medical components plausible without exotic inputs. Runners-up pushed production frontiers from different angles: Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s multiplexing extrusion system enabled purge-free, in-bead multi-material deposition that improves interlayer adhesion and reduces downtime, while Hybrid Manufacturing Technologies integrated AM, machining, and in-situ ultrasonic volumetric inspection to catch defects during builds rather than after.
Adoption, Scalability, and Next Steps
Trends and Implications
A clear thread ran through the hall: bottleneck removal. REM’s chemistry attacked the Achilles’ heel of powder-bed metals—sealed channels clogged beyond reach—making complex thermal architectures usable instead of hypothetical. Sandia’s stress-focused pathfinding reframed thin-section failures not as geometry mistakes but as process-energy and post-heat problems that can be tuned. B9Creations refracted miniaturization through an elastomer lens, blending DLP precision with soluble tooling to extend softness and biocompatibility into channels and diaphragms far below a millimeter. Meanwhile, ORNL’s MExS targeted material changeovers—the bane of multi-material extrusion—by keeping transitions inside the bead, and Hybrid Manufacturing Technologies folded nondestructive inspection into the build, where feedback loops can actually avert scrap. Together, these moves pushed AM toward audit-ready, data-backed production lines.
Actionable Paths Forward
For organizations charting next steps, three actions stood out and were already being practiced on the ground. First, design with post-processing in mind: for metal powder-bed parts with internal channels, pair early CT benchmarking with selective chemical clearance trials to lock parameters before design freeze, then document flow-restoration metrics that map to service requirements. Second, operationalize microfabrication by piloting soluble-tooling workflows on a narrow class of silicone components—microfluidic manifolds or compliant valves—using commercial materials and gauge studies to establish capability indices that quality teams accept. Third, build hybrid assurance: implement in-situ ultrasonic or thermographic monitoring on safety-critical builds and tie signals to interpass interventions and CNC touchoffs, reducing rework and accelerating certification. Taken together, these steps translated show-floor breakthroughs into controlled, production-ready playbooks.
