Titomic tests tech limits in Rocket City
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Titomic tech in action. Photo: Courtesy of Titomic
Innovation in the Rocket City isn't all about missiles and rocket science.
Why it matters: Australia-born Titomic has found a home in Huntsville, where it plans to push the boundaries of next-gen manufacturing.
How it works: Titomic uses cold-spray additive technology, essentially shooting particles of metal at a surface at such a high speed (greater than Mach 5) that they "weld" without needing external heat.
- That prevents any thermal distortion or phase-change weakening, explains CEO Jim Simpson, providing the same properties of the bulk material as if the object were machined.
- How fast? Titomic recently manufactured a 178-kilogram (392-pound) part in 72 hours, a job that would typically take four to five weeks using traditional additive manufacturing, he said.
- Those properties make the technology a good fit for a variety of applications, Simpson said, including oil and gas, aerospace and defense.
What they're saying: "What we're building here is our model for the future of U.S. manufacturing ... agile, advanced, and aligned with national resilience goals," Simpson told Axios Huntsville.
Zoom in: Huntsville, where the company employs about 20 with plans to grow, is "central to our strategy," he said. "It's going to be where we demonstrate the real-world value of localized, rapid, responsive manufacturing."
- Proximity to NASA, Redstone Arsenal and defense contractors is part of that strategy, he said, but it's also academic partnerships and local talent: "We found engineers, machinists, technicians, who really understand the rigor and standards of our high-performance systems."
- On employees relocating to Huntsville — a hot topic as Space Command's relocation begins taking shape — Simpson said newcomers' "perception of Huntsville versus when they get here is substantially different."
- He pointed to city facilities, entertainment, dining, health care options, education facilities and cost of living as checks in the "pro" column for Huntsville.
Case in point: On Nov. 18, UAH announced a grant from Titomic to fund the development of a computational model for the fabrication of a novel cold-spray gun to take the technology to the next level.
- Initial plans for the partnership were just to improve Titomic's commercially marketed cold-spray gun system, per the announcement from UAH, but ultimately, they decided to go further than designs and fabricate actual cold-spray guns based on those new designs.
The bottom line: "We believe Huntsville is going to become synonymous with the next generation of additive manufacturing innovation," Simpson said.