Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the U.S. Department of Energy's largest multi-program science and energy laboratory, established a public-private partnership with Autonomous Resource (ARC), to accelerate on-demand manufacturing.

The partnership, known as the Exascale Foundry, will combine ORNL's computing and manufacturing capabilities with ARC's distributed manufacturing platform to create a closed-loop system for AI-enabled materials and manufacturing qualification and autonomous production at defense-relevant scale.

"By combining ORNL's world-leading computational, materials science and manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous production infrastructure, we can compress manufacturing and qualification timelines from years to months and deliver manufactured parts,” said Bryan Wisk, CEO of ARC.

Under the memorandum of understanding, ARC will deploy advanced manufacturing equipment organized into seven production nodes connected to ORNL via ARC's infrastructure. ARC will expand capability through ORNL's high-performance computing (HPC) resources.

ORNL will provide access to HPC expertise for simulation-driven materials characterization and qualification, along with technologies developed at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF), the Department of Energy's only large-scale, open-access advanced manufacturing facility. ORNL's Peregrine AI software, which has analyzed more than 1.9 million additive manufacturing layers, will be integrated into ARC's production nodes for real-time adaptive control and quality assurance.

The partnership also supports DOE's Genesis Mission, a national initiative to build the world's most powerful scientific platform to accelerate discovery science, strengthen national security and drive energy innovation (Figure 1). ARC and ORNL's collective capabilities will help reenvision advanced manufacturing and industrial productivity, accelerate defense production and qualification and secure critical supply chain elements.

"ORNL's advanced manufacturing and computing capabilities are uniquely positioned to help accelerate the transition of laboratory-proven technologies into production-scale defense manufacturing," said Moe Khaleel, ORNL associate laboratory director for National Security Sciences. "Partnering with ARC ensures we are transitioning our research into real production outcomes."

The initial implementation will focus on high-temperature nickel superalloy turbine components for autonomous air vehicle engines using metal binder jetting technology, directly addressing demonstrated production bottlenecks.