ORNL Continues WAAM Work on Industrial Pressure Vessels with Idaho National Laboratory

At last year’s Additive Manufacturing Strategies (AMS), we spent an entire morning of a three-day show on DED, and specifically pressure vessels. To many, pressure vessels are a rather obscure 3D printing application. But to us, they’re absolutely essential for applications in oil & gas, nuclear energy, rockets, hydrogen, industrial power, and underwater structures. A lot of any new energy infrastructure, whichever path it takes, will end up using a lot of pressure vessels. And with DED, we can make huge ones at relatively low cost. We can also test them to specifications and they can pass, meaning a more surefooted adoption path for engineers and management. That pass and fail is something we’re sorely missing with other parts, such as components under fatigue load.

So it’s obvious that