Suman Das, Founder & CEO, DDM Systems, A DotCom Magazine Interview

The DotCom Magazine Entrepreneur Spotlight Series

About Suman Das and DDM Systems:

Founder of DDM Systems, a Silicon Valley venture backed digital manufacturing company. Entrepreneur in the commercialization of disruptive technologies for additive manufacturing. Chair Professor of Advanced Manufacturing Systems at Georgia Tech with broad expertise in advanced and additive manufacturing techniques. Thirty years of experience in research, design, development, and optimization of additive manufacturing techniques for polymers, high temperature metals, ceramics, and composites with applications in aerospace turbine engines, resorbable implants for tissue regeneration, precision investment casting ceramic molds, polymer nanocomposites, and solid oxide fuel cells. Expert in equipment and process design, and process control for additive manufacturing. Materials processing expertise involving various lasers and length scales as well as large-area laser microfabrication and nanofabrication, maskless photopolymerization, and maskless lithography.

Specialties: Direct Digital Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing, 3-D Printing, Direct Part Manufacturing, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Laser Microfabrication and Nanofabrication, Photopolymerization, Maskless Lithography, Rapid Prototyping, Design and Manufacturing, Lasers, Laser Materials Processing, Biomaterials, Biomedical Implants, Tissue Engineering, Aerospace materials and structures, Superalloys, Fuel Cells. Additive Manufacturing of Ceramics, Nickel-base Superalloys, Polymers and Polymer Nanocomposites.

DDM Systems is an Atlanta-based additive manufacturing and 3D printing startup. The company was founded in 2012 by Suman Das and John Halloran to rapidly commercialize LAMP™and SLE™, two disruptive manufacturing technologies with immediate applications in the aerospace and industrial gas turbines sectors.

Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization (LAMP™) is a breakthrough additive technology for the tool-less, on-demand and affordable direct digital manufacturing (DDM) of ceramic cores and integral-cored shell molds for investment casting of high-precision, high-performance turbine engine hot-section components such as airfoils. LAMP produced ceramic cores are fully compatible with current investment casting foundry practices.

Scanning Laser Epitaxy (SLE™) builds upon over two decades of metal powder bed-based laser additive manufacturing experience and achieves a breakthrough in manufacture and repair of high-value turbine engine hot-section components made of non-weldable superalloys. SLE achieves controlled epitaxial deposition of equiaxed (EQ), directionally-solidified (DS) and single-crystal (SX) materials to produce fully dense, crack-free structures. This capability surpasses existing metal additive techniques.

In response to the rapidly growing demand for both technologies, DDM Systems will deliver commercial systems in 2015.