Announcing the first-ever Advanced Manufacturing Olympics medalists
In June, we invited talented technologists from across the country to compete in five Technical Challenges, all aimed at solving some of the U.S. Air Force’s most significant sustainment issues. Over the span of a few months, the teams collaborated on innovative and goal-oriented solutions for the chance to win up to $100,000.
Last week, we had the exciting opportunity to watch their journey at our first-ever Advanced Manufacturing Olympics, a four-day virtual experience of compelling speakers, insightful sessions, exciting technology demos, networking, and more. We were so impressed by all of the participants’ ability to translate innovative ideas into enduring solutions, but only three teams per challenge could take home a medal.
Learn more about each challenge and find out who won the gold, silver, and bronze prizes below!
TDP Relay
The Challenge: Accurately recreate a 3D printed part from an existing Technical Data Package using innovative techniques, all while demonstrating accuracy, skill, and completeness.
The Winners:
Gold: MakerGear
Silver: W.M. Keck Center for 3D Innovations at UTEP
Bronze: Electroimpact
Box of Parts
The Challenge: Accurately reengineer a part without an existing plan, ultimately identifying hands-free scanning for rapid and accurate reverse engineering capabilities.
The Winners:
Silver: Aero Design, LLC
Bronze: 3D Printing Colorado
Material Hurdles
The Challenge: Identify and demonstrate new developments in aluminum, polymer and combination or hybrid technologies to test the strength of materials, ingenuity of design, and ease of use of proposed solutions, and to ultimately identify new aluminum materials.
The Winners:
Gold: Elementum 3D, Inc.
Silver: University of Waterloo and The Barnes Global Advisors, LLC
Bronze: Castheon, Inc.
Approval Sprints
The Challenge: Identify innovative strategies for rapid design, qualification and deployment of sustainment solutions which leverage new manufacturing materials, processes, and components to bring radical change to Air Force certification methods and timelines.
The Winners:
Gold: Stress Engineering Services, Inc., Origin, & nTopology, Inc.
Silver: Stratasys
Bronze: NIAR at Wichita State University
Supply Chain Marathon
The Challenge: Develop the use of novel advanced manufacturing concepts coupled with innovative Supply Chain Management (SCM) approaches to propose the best basing strategy that satisfies the most warfighter requirements, and delivers parts on-time and on-schedule.
The Winners:
Gold: SIMBA Chain
Silver: Stratasys
Bronze: Boeing Global Services
Congratulations to all AMO 2020 Technical Challenge medalists! Thank you for your hard work and commitment.