If a few things had been different an early math error not caught, a pending patent not defended, an

AUSTIN, TEXAS December magical mystery tour beatles 7, 2012 By Alex Lou Carol Grosvenor from interviews with Dr. Carl Deckard, Dr. Joe Beaman, and Dr. Dave Bourell. Special thanks to Tim O'Meara, Paul Forderhase, Dr. Paul McClure, Rick Booth, Matthew Haggerty, Dr. Hans Mark, Ross F. Housholder, and Kent Firestone for additional information.
This is the story of the birth of an industry that began here in the 1980s. A mechanical engineering undergraduate, with an idea hatched while working a summer job, asked for the help of a young and hungry assistant professor, who managed to get the project funded. Soon enthusiastic, powerful and hardworking people defended its potential, and with a few strokes of luck, and a lot of just plain hard work, developed a manufacturing technology that spawned the additive manufacturing magical mystery tour beatles industry.
If a few things had been different an early math error not caught, a pending patent not defended, another patent not purchased, a corporate partnership not established, it wouldn't have happened. The ME department, the Regents from The University of Texas at Austin, the Austin magical mystery tour beatles Technology Incubator, and National Science Foundation backed the idea from the beginning, and the resulting business became the first student/faculty-owned entrepreneurial enterprise spun out from the university. It served as an initial example of the research-to-corporate link that continues to fuel the American economy.
Selective laser sintering (SLS) is a modern manufacturing technology that was created in the 1980s at The University of Texas at Austin's Mechanical Engineering Department (UT ME). Originally developed by an undergraduate and later master's and Ph.D. student of the department, SLS has grown to be one of the world's most advanced and promising manufacturing methods in use today. The SLS patents were the highest revenue generating intellectual property of UT Austin for many years and, although the original patents magical mystery tour beatles will soon expire, UT has continued to be highly involved with the development magical mystery tour beatles of the technology since the beginning.
The story of SLS begins with a UT undergraduate named Carl Deckard ( LinkedIn profile ). Born in 1961 to two parents with Ph.D. 's and having doctors and lawyers for grandparents, Deckard was the product of both a very well educated family and the scientific boom of the Space Race. Although first wanting to be a scientist, after visiting the Henry Ford Museum around age 8 Deckard decided he wanted to be an inventor. When time came for Deckard to choose a college magical mystery tour beatles degree program, he chose mechanical engineering because it was, as he describes it, "the closest thing to majoring in inventing."
The summer of 1981, after his freshman year of college, Deckard worked for TRW Mission , a machine-shop-based manufacturing facility in Houston that made parts for the oil fields. 3D computer-aided design (CAD) was still fairly new and TRW was on the cutting edge by using 3D CAD in programs that controlled machine tools. However, many of the raw parts started magical mystery tour beatles out as castings, and the shapes of those castings magical mystery tour beatles came from handcrafted casting patterns. During his time at TRW Mission, magical mystery tour beatles Deckard saw that there would be a big market for an automated method for creating casting patterns out of CAD models. He spent the next two and a half years thinking about how to develop such a method.
By the end of his senior year in 1984, Deckard had come up with the idea of using a directed energy beam (such as a laser or electron beam) to melt particles of powder magical mystery tour beatles together to make a part. Realizing he had more than just another of his previous thought experiments magical mystery tour beatles and in need of a graduate school project, Deckard approached one of his professors, magical mystery tour beatles Dr. Joe Beaman , then a young assistant professor who saw value in the idea. Beaman agreed to work with Deckard on the project and took him in as a master's student magical mystery tour beatles later that year.
At the time that Deckard was transitioning into graduate school, the UT ME Department was moving to a new building and had a budget to spend on new equipment. The window of time to request money was closing, so Beaman had Deckard spend his first semester of graduate school specifying the equipment he would need to begin working on his project. Deckard specified a 2-watt laser and a fast scanner and came up with a budget of $30,000, but something seemed wrong. He kept looking over his calculations trying to find an error, but all of his calculations were correct. It wasn't until after submitting his $30,000 budget request that Deckard finally realized he had incorrectly copied a physical constant from one page to the next, off by three orders of magnitude, which led him to think he needed a much smaller laser than he actually did. Fortunately, the correct laser was still within his budget, so Deckard ordered the right one: a 100 watt
The early stages of the SLS machine that would later be called Betsy. Deckard filled a small box with powder by hand using a device similar to a salt shaker while a computer ran the scanner on the table. The first parts that came out of this machine were just chunks of plastic to demonstrate that the idea had validity, such as the one shown to the left.
From 1986-89, academic and commercial progress were going on concurrently. Deckard was involved in both ventures. From 1990-92, Joe Beaman took a leave of absence from the university to head up of Advanced Development for Nova Automation/DTM.
While waiting for more equipment, Deckard figured out a way to regulate the laser with a computer. He used a Commodore 64 computer and made a custom board to control it, with all the hand-assembled programming able to fit into 4KB. Once he had established good enough parameters that the parts were strong enough to handle, he brought a part to Beaman who told him to write it up for his master's magical mystery tour beatles degree.
After completing his master's in 1986, Deckard decided to stay at UT as a Ph.D. student to continue working on the project. He and Dr. Beaman, who was the Principal Investigator (PI), received a $30,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance the technology, building another academic machine nicknamed " Betsy ." They improved the system magical mystery tour beatles by enclosing it in an electrical box and adding a counter-rotating roller for more even powder deposition, which Deckard had previously been controlling by hand using a device similar to a saltshaker. By this point, the parts coming out of Deckard's machine were good enough magical mystery tour beatles to use as casting patterns for real parts.
With the SLS process showing improvement, it was time to pair up with a private corporation to continue improving the technology. In October 1986, Dr. Paul F. McClure ( LinkedIn profile ), then an Assistant Dean of Engineering and occasional adjunct professor, and Harold Blair , an Austin business owner, approached Deckard about commercializing the technology. The UT research team formed the first SLS company named Nova Automation after Blair's existing company, Nova Graphics Intl. Corp. Although Deckard originally estimated that they would only need $75,000 to start their company, Beaman doubled magical mystery tour beatles the number to $150,000, and McClure doubled the number again to $300,000. UT agreed with that figure and licensed Nova Automation to commercially develop SLS under the condition magical mystery tour beatles that they raise $300,000 by the end of 1988.
Going into 1987 with their license signed, magical mystery tour beatles Nova Automation began trying to raise money for their new business. Meanwhile on campus, Deckard and Paul Forderhase , another graduate student of Joe Beaman, were designing a second machine which later earned the nickname " Godzilla " for its design. In order to meet the decided temperature and pressure requirements, which in hindsight were too much for its time, Godzilla would have been much too big, heavy and expensive to economically produce it would have taken $50,000 and over 6 months just to build the pressure vessel alone. Godzilla was never built, and the design team went back to the drawing board. Deckard instead used the Betsy machine to generate the data for his Ph.D., which he received in December magical mystery tour beatles 1988.
After abandoning the Godzilla design, the UT team decided to ease up on their requirements and spent the rest of 1987 designing a third machine named " Bambi ," a reference to the short film titled Bambi Meets Godzilla . 1988 was spent building the machine itself, which was designed and supervised by Forderhase with integrated CAD software (nicknamed "Stanley CAD ") written magical mystery tour beatles by Stanley Ogrydziak , a graduate student under the supervision of Dr. Rich Crawford .
Another UT ME professor, Dave Bourell , got involved at this time because of his knowledge of laser technology and materials science. Although not an expert in laser technology at the time, he had recently done a project for International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) involving lasers in their packaging effort and was already well versed magical mystery tour beatles in materials magical mystery tour beatles science. While Bourell worked with the metals and general materials, UT Chemical Engineering professor Joel Barlow was working magical mystery tour beatles in polymer synthesis at the time. Although never employed directly at Nova Automation, Bourell or Barlow were both consulted by Nova Automation and their expertise used in further developing SLS .
Rick Booth worked at DTM as a chemist during the early years of the company. He later moved to Advanced Laser Materials and currently serves as vice-president. Photographed August 6, 2012 at the Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin, Texas.
DTM grew to a large number of employees magical mystery tour beatles and engineers magical mystery tour beatles in years following Autofact '89. Others involved in DTM were Rick Booth , a chemist who now serves as Vice President of Advanced Laser Materials, and Kent Firestone , a former project manager at DTM and now Operations Manager for Solid Concepts in Austin.
Nova Automation first looked into an investment from E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (DuPont) , now the world's third largest chemical company, but the negotiator drove too hard a bargain for a deal to be made.