CWRU Engineering Arc One Project

CWRU’s School of Engineering is on a mission to change the way metal components are engineered and manufactured through 3D printing, and we need your help!

What is Arc One?

A multidisciplinary team of 13 CWRU engineers is designing and building the Arc One, an open-source, modular, low-cost machine that 3D prints metal using Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) — a large-scale process used to 3D print or repair metal components, with very minimal material wastage. In addition to producing metal components, Arc One will allow research teams to easily and quickly implement and test new hardware and software techniques to develop enhanced approaches to manufacturing metal components. Arc One is fully machined and assembled in CWRU with the help of Sears Thinkbox.

To know more, please visit our Arc One website.

We are looking for funding for this project to help us further our research, meet grant requirements, and provide paid work opportunities for students who want to participate in building Arc One. Help us reach our goal.

Why is Arc One Important?

With a cubic build volume of 8000 cubic inches (20 x 20 x 20), Arc One has a simple cartesian gantry system that carries the welding gun in all 3 axes. The machine is designed to be very modular and uses many generic components. It helps in quick hardware modifications, easy to find replacement parts for repairs and upgrades. The control system and its firmware are open source, free of cost, easy for new teams to learn, and provide root-level access for the highest level of software customization.

These benefits will help academic and industrial research teams to effortlessly adapt and test new hardware and software techniques for fast a paced research and development in Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing. Increased use of this technology will also benefit the country with less wastage, thus lowering the overall energy required to manufacture the components.

We completed Phase 1 of Arc One development with initial funding from the Institute for Smart, Secure, and Connected Systems (ISSACS), think[box], and LaunchNet. After receiving $80,000 through NASA’s University Student Research Challenge this year, we built a larger multidisciplinary team of 13 students to help us progress the work in Phase 2.

Once the machine is built and optimized (after Phase 3), it will support 3D printing metal components (Steel, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, and Inconel alloys) for the research funded by the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center — HAMMER (Hybrid Autonomous Manufacturing, Moving from Evolution to Revolution) — where John Lewandowski, Distinguished University Professor and the Arthur P. Armington Professor of Engineering II in materials science, leads the CWRU team.