Rapid ascent: forward-thinking North Carolinians put the state in position to capitalize on the growing airplane-manufacturing industry.

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In 2012, late-night TV show host Jay Leno did a segment about 3-D printing. A part for Leno's 1907 White Steam Car broke, and he couldn't find a new one. But with a 3-D scanner and printer, Leno promised, he and anyone else in need of a rare spare part could make a replacement. Leno's segment was one of many TV spots and articles that made up the media hype surrounding 3-D printing a couple of years ago after the patent expired for a leading 3-D-printer manufacturer. The public saw it as a manufacturing revolution that would improve access to anyone needing the technology. By then, however, 3-D manufacturing was old news to Ola Harrysson, who had joined the industrial and systems engineering department at North Carolina State University in 2002. His primary task was to build an additive-manufacturing laboratory. The process draws its name from the way parts are produced. Instead of taking a piece of metal and cutting away excess to sculpt a part--a process called subtractive manufacturing additive manufacturing builds the part by adding layer after layer of material. "We had been doing it all along, and no one was paying attention," he says.

That manufacturing expertise puts North Carolina in a particularly good position when it comes to aerospace companies, which use specialized parts that can be made more efficiently with the process. The state that was first in flight because of the Wright brothers was also the first to this new style of manufacturing. N.C. State purchased the worlds first electron beam melting machine in 2003. As other universities and companies purchased the state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, N.C. State collaborated with them. Its early recognition that the additive process would be the future of manufacturing placed the university at the forefront of research and development of the new technology.

N.C. State's Center for Additive Manufacturing and Logistics, which Harrysson co-directs, is especially important to the aerospace industry, which is based on precision, not mass production. When parts are made through metal casting, the yield is often low because of mistakes during the process. With 3-D printing, the yield increases, and fewer parts are lost due to procedural error. "In aerospace, you don't need very many parts because you don't need a million airplanes," Harrysson says. "With certain components, you only need a couple of hundred a year. It's extremely expensive through the traditional manufacturing processes ... but [the way we] make parts, we don't care if you make one or hundreds or a hundred different parts."

Additive manufacturing produces parts of equal strength compared with those using traditional materials, but at a fraction of the weight. The parts are hollow inside, and the reduced weight means improved fuel efficiency, which translates to lower costs and environmental impact. The additive process also produces parts with internal features, such as cooling channels, that aren't possible to manufacture with traditional approaches.

Harrysson and his team are working to speed up the finished-machining process required to smooth the parts after they're produced. Some companies he works with can print a part in 24 hours, but it may take four to six weeks to smooth it. Harrysson plans to reduce that time to 48 or 72 hours by developing technology to automate the finishing.

The N.C. State...