About Us
The Center for Laser Assisted Advanced Manufacturing was established in 2019 with $1.5M in total economic cost funding from the New York State Regional Economic Development Council (REDC). The idea behind the REDC funding is to drive local economies forward and implement strategic plans for growth. The facility is housed in the newly built Innovation and Discovery Center (IDC) building at Stony Brook University Research and Technology Park. It brings together laser manufacturing and materials science expertise from Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, and Chemistry Departments. It also has strong affiliations with the Institute for Advanced Computations Sciences (IACS), Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) and the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC).
Center's Mission
Advances in science and technology usually outpace their ability to be deployed effectively in the industry. Concerns over risks associated with adopting novel and often unproven manufacturing techniques, especially those requiring high up-front investment, often impede technological progress. The more prudent approach of waiting for others to explore the unknown technological terrains, demonstrate the viability of the proposed scientific solutions and discover hidden traps along the way, is much more palatable for the industry. In the 70’s such considerations arguably held back the use of lasers for welding, cutting and heat treatment; until after their value was confirmed at a lab scale. Learning the lessons from the past, understanding fundamental and scale-up limitations of the upcoming technologies, and constructing predictive models to reduce their risks can create an exciting future for the laser enabled manufacturing.
Our mission is to assemble a world-class team with the unique fundamental knowledge and extensive industry experience to expand industrial applications of Lasers. More specifically, our Center for Laser Assisted Manufacturing will bring together a cutting-edge laser technology, material processing and characterization under the same roof. In partnership with industry, we will identify the key limitations in current fabrication processes to increase the product yield while maintaining reliable processes in place with a view of increasing throughput and minimizing cost.
The Center will use the concept of production testbeds that will comprehensively explore design, material deposition and laser processing of the new materials in order to achieve novel equilibrium and metastable multi-phases enabling multiple functionalities. This ambitious mission will be accomplished by an interdisciplinary group of researchers addressing both additive and subtractive manufacturing while at the same time integrating process sensing, monitoring controls, and modeling.