Chad Duty

Associate Professor in the Mechanical, Aerospace & Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee.

Chad is an Associate Professor in the Mechanical, Aerospace, & Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee. Chad also continues to work part time as Joint Faculty 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 focuses on advanced materials and process developments for additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. This work recently led to the commercialization of a large-scale 3D printer for polymer composites called BAAM (for Big Area Additive Manufacturing) as well as the manufacture of the world’s first 3D printed car (the Strati).

Chad’s work has led to over 100 publications, 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. Chad also serves as the Associate Editor of one of the leading scientific journals in his field, the Additive Manufacturing journal. 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 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 joined the University of Tennessee in August 2015 and maintains a Joint Faculty appointment with ORNL’s MDF.