Melissa Orme, Ph.D. received her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Doctorate degrees in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining The Boeing Company, her career had been divided between academia and small business. On the academic front, she worked as a Professor at UCI for twelve years, where she rose to the rank of Full Professor. Dr. Orme belongs to that small group of engineers who have participated ‘hands-on’ in the field of Additive Manufacturing before the term or even the industry of “Additive Manufacturing” existed. She was an early pioneer in the field of 3D printing of metallic parts resulting in 15 US patents relevant to 3D printing, which are concerned with novel AM methods with molten metal micro-droplets, novel methods of customizing the size distribution of metallic powders, and high speed direct circuit board printing.

Prior to her current position, she served as CTO of Morf3D for four years. Morf3D is a company that is focused on Additive Manufacturing of metallic components primarily for the Aerospace and Defense Industry. In that capacity she oversaw the company’s AM development programs for small lot production, which includes new material parameter development, novel AM design implementation, component validation and qualification.

Currently serving as Vice President of Boeing Additive Manufacturing, Melissa will continue to grow and scale additive manufacturing capabilities and help to rapidly expand understanding of the unique features that 3D printing can bring to our factories and production lines while improving safety and quality. She will drive application scalability for existing products, and mature technology for future franchise platforms across Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Defense, Space and Security and Boeing Global Services.

Abstract

Title: Recent advances in the disruptive technology of additive manufacturing at Boeing

Additive Manufacturing offers numerous benefits in the aerospace sector including: light-weighting, part consolidation, on-demand manufacturing, faster time to market, and addressing pain points in supply chain, all of which leads to cost/fuel savings. More important than part-specific value added, additive manufacturing enables the opportunity to optimize the end product, not just the part within the product.  This presentation discusses the challenges of full scale production of air-worthy additively manufactured hardware, and how Boeing is addressing these challenges, including the creation of the digital twin at every instance along our value stream, and the incorporation of this data into our digital thread to enable scale and quality. Finally, this talk will describe two case studies that illustrate the value added of additive manufacturing insertions in current Boeing platforms.

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