ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
The world of beamline science is often fast-paced and dynamic. One of the major challenges in this environment is to be able to design, manufacture and then implement new items for use on the beamlines in a fast and accurate manner. Many times, this involves iterating the design to address unknown or new variables which were not present at the beginning of the project planning task. Through the use of additive manufacturing, I have been able to support the user programs of various (APS) Advanced Photon Source beamlines* across multiple scientific disciplines. I will provide a few detailed examples of Items that were created for specific beamline applications and discuss what benefits they provided to the pertinent project. I will also talk about why choosing consumer-level printer options to produce the parts has been the direction I went and the pros and cons of this decision. Primarily, this choice allowed for quicker turnaround times and the ability to make more frequent changes in an efficient manner. Currently, we are utilizing only the fused deposition modeling (FDM) type printers but I am exploring the addition of UV-activated resin printing, exotic materials that can be utilized using the current toolset, and the possibility of commercial metal printing systems. This technology has been a game-changer for the implementation of new support items and instrumentation over the last couple of years for the different disciplines I am supporting. I will discuss how the roadmap ahead and what the evolving technologies could potentially allow us to do.
*Thanks to the members of the DYS, MM, and TRR groups for their collaboration.
