Chad Duty, PhD
Professor
[email protected]
Chad Duty is currently a Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department at the University of Tennessee and the CEO of IACMI – The Composites Institute. Chad also holds a joint faculty appointment with the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he previously was a Senior Research Scientist and Group Leader of the Deposition Science & Technology Group. Dr. Duty’s research has primarily focused on advanced materials and process developments for additive manufacturing, or 3D printing of composite materials. He was part of a team that developed and helped to commercialize one of the world’s largest 3D printers called BAAM (Big Area Additive Manufacturing) and created the world’s first 3D printed car (the Strati). Chad’s work has led to over 170 publications, more than a dozen patents, and several R&D100 Awards in this field, as well as previous research on roll-to-roll manufacturing and solar energy technologies.
Additional Background Info:
Following his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1997, Chad received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech in 2001. His dissertation focused on the development of a new type of rapid prototyping using Gas-Jet Laser Chemical Vapor Deposition. After spending a few years with Lockheed Martin on the redesign of the C-5 Galaxy, he joined ORNL as a Wigner Fellow in 2004. Dr. Duty’s early research involved high temperature material development for small scale nuclear reactors and the use of high intensity plasma arc lamps for the Pulse Thermal Processing (PTP) of various thin films, semiconductors, and photovoltaic materials. Chad also led an initiative on the bacterial-production of complex nanoparticles, called NanoFermentation, and served as ORNL’s Solar Program Manager and the Director of Technology for the Tennessee Solar Institute.
More recently, Dr. Duty helped to establish ORNL’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, where he worked to improve the mechanical performance of polymer-based additive manufactured components and contributed to the development of a large-scale 3D printer, called Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM), capable of depositing parts 10x larger and 200x faster than current technology. As Group Leader for Deposition Science & Technology, Chad was involved in a variety of projects, including site-specific microstructural control of metal additive manufacturing, neutron imaging and residual stress characterization, magnetic field processing, and direct write electronics. Dr. Duty has also previously served as the Associate Director of UT’s Center for Material Processing and Associate Editor of the Additive Manufacturing journal. He joined the University of Tennessee in August 2015 and started working with IACMI in November 2022.