ALEX ROSCHLI’S LIFE HAS A WAY OF CIRCLING back to Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). As a child, his family first moved to East Tennessee when his father relocated to work as a reactor operator.
“My dad retired from Oak Ridge National Lab, where I work today,” Roschli shared. “That was kind of my early exposure to engineering—his role at the lab and getting to see what he was involved in.”
Today, Roschli works at ORNL in large-format additive manufacturing research. An internship first brought him to work in the lab after his freshman year in electrical engineering. The group he worked with, he said, was mostly mechanical engineers, giving him exposure to how both sides work hand in hand.
“I continued with electrical engineering just because that fit well,” he said. “But as I’ve gotten more and more into my career, more of the work that I do, and especially more of the work that I enjoy, is more mechanical.”
He eventually went back for a mechanical engineering Ph.D. through the University of Texas at El Paso, following a nontraditional, research-based path designed for established researchers. It was an intense year and a half, but he could tailor the Ph.D. to line up with his work at the lab.
“It’s very helpful for all the manufacturing we do and the robotics work,” he said. “You can’t have one without the other.”
That’s a Big Print
Large format 3D printing at ORNL is on another level from what you can print on your desktop or at a local library maker space.
“A lot of the very interesting stuff that you’ve probably seen we’ve printed are like 3D-printed cars and houses and submarines. It’s direct printing of these objects, which is really cool,” Roschli said.
No one is selling 3D printed cars in large volumes though. In that sense, he said, it hasn’t gained much traction. But what is taking off is the work the lab is doing now on concrete formwork for nuclear reactor construction and shielding.
3D-printed precast concrete molding really kicked off with a project that happened in 2016, he explained. ORNL worked on printing concrete molds for the Domino Sugar building in Brooklyn, where the old factory was being repurposed into a mixed-use residential structure on the waterfront. The facade required more than 100 unique molds, each slightly different to help the building reflect light and evoke the look of a sugar cube.
“You could do it with wood, but it’s a very slow, very manual labor type process,” Roschli said. “We were able to do it all with 3D printing, so it saved them a lot of time—and the molds are reusable for much longer. Wood molds last about 10 uses, whereas 3D printed ones are more than 100 uses in and still usable.”
Ten years on, that technology is being used for nuclear reactor shielding, where concrete makes up a major part of the structure, safety systems, and construction cost.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work on trying to make more complex geometries for the concrete forms so that you can get better shielding, hopefully use less concrete, and make it less expensive,” Roschli said. His team has already seen promising results working with Kairos Power, a company that is building a nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge, on molds for its new facility.
He’s also beginning to explore a longer-term question of recycling once a project is complete: “If all these forms we build for a structure are not reusable at the next site, can we grind it back up and reuse that material to build new forms?”
Roschli has a lot of 3D printers at home—24 of them, in fact. “My wife has a business, and we print a tremendous amount of stuff.” He even 3D printed his wedding band, and has been thinking about printing a custom swimming pool.
“At my first engineering job, I broke something [that] took a few hours to repair. I remember my boss saying, ‘If you’re not breaking things, you're not doing stuff.’ Stay hands on and don’t worry about failing: You’re going to break some stuff along the way, but you’re going to hopefully learn a lot from those mistakes you make.”
—Alex Roschli, R&D Staff, Oak Ridge National Lab
A Greater System at Play
Roschli’s interest has always been in developing systems. The applications are cool because they’re tangible and people can understand a printed car. But he wants to see more work being done on building better, bigger, faster systems.
“The cost of these large format systems is still very high. It’s kind of prohibitive for some industries to get involved,” he said. “So I think my interest in the research is trying to keep pushing the boundaries of not only what we can make, but what the systems need to have to build that equipment, to build those unique parts.”
His project SkyBAM, a large-format, infrastructure-scale 3D printer for making large concrete objects, is a system gaining him recognition. The work earned an ASME patent award and eventually transitioned to industry.
Another award that carries special meaning is the Additive Manufacturing Users Group’s DINO (Distinguished Innovator and Operator) Award. “You have to have 10 years of experience in the industry, and I won when I was 29,” he said. “So I think that one means a lot to me.”
The focus on systems has shaped his work, including the ORNL Slicer, an open-source slicing and toolpathing software package for large-format 3D printing that he has helped develop since 2014, and more recent expeditionary manufacturing projects for the U.S. military. That effort involves deployable systems that can be transported and set up in remote locations.
Outside of the technology itself, Roschli is also thinking about who gets to use it next. Low cost printers are now common in homes, schools, and libraries, but access to machines doesn’t always mean students are learning how to use their full potential.
“A lot of people have 3D printers and they’ve never designed their own parts for them because they can just download what they need,” Roschli said. “But they could do a lot more if they could design parts.”
That is one reason he values mentoring. At ORNL, he works with interns ranging from high school students to postdocs, and through SME’s Bright Minds program, he mentors a student in Texas monthly.
His advice to young engineers comes from a lesson he learned early on that the best way to learn is to learn by doing. “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not doing stuff,” Roschli said.
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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