It is our privilege to present the second progress report of the NSERC Strategic Network for Holistic Innovation in Additive Manufacturing (HI-AM). In addition to an overview of the Network vision, mission and governance, this report summarizes the research outcomes and network activities that took place between July 2019 and July 2020. First and foremost, we are very grateful to the members of the Network, including 19 Principal Investigators, 22 Industry/Government/Non-profit partners, 95 highly qualified personnel, two academic collaborators, and ten international academic partners. Furthermore, we recognize the contributions of the members of the Board of Directors, the Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Commercialization and Outreach Advisory Committee.
We are very pleased to let you know that we have 38 active projects across four research themes under the supervision of the Network principal investigators. More than 180 journal and conference papers have been produced through these projects. This number is more than 250 papers if we include those papers that are produced by the HI-AM researchers related to metal AM but not directly supported by HI-AM financially. Additionally, three invention disclosures have been filed, and interesting and impactful results are now emerging from the HI-AM R&D teams. Efforts are being made to commercialize these inventions through our industrial partners.
As we entered 2020, many of our plans were affected by the global pandemic. We originally planned to hold the 2020 HI-AM conference at McGill University in Montreal; however, the pandemic gave us no choice but to either cancel the conference or organize it online. As we believe that the scientific progress \and sharing research results should not stop, we decided to use a virtual conference platform to organize the HI-AM conference online. The online HI-AM conference, held on June 25th and 26th, 2020, included 99 talks and poster presentations. This conference would not have been possible without the contributions of many individuals and organizations. In particular, we would like to extend our appreciation to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), University of Waterloo, McGill University, Javelin Technologies, EOS, KEYENCE CORPORATION, KSB Company, Leichtbau BW GmbH, Multi-Scale Additive Manufacturing Laboratory, Promation, Proto3000, TRUMPF, and Xact Metal.
One of the major negative impacts of the pandemic has been the cancellation of our exchange programs in 2020. In addition, several outreach programs have been delayed. The network manager is working very hard to push these activities to 2021 with the hope that the global pandemic will have subsided by Spring 2021. It is also obvious that several experimental projects have been altered, and we will face some progress delays in these projects.
We appreciate you taking the time to read this report, and we hope you find it useful. To learn more about the Network statistics and progress, please explore the HI-AM Network website at https://nserc-hi-am.ca/. If you need any further information, please feel free to contact our Network Manager, Farzad Liravi, at fliravi@uwaterloo.ca.
Ralph Resnick, Chair of the Board of Directors
Ehsan Toyserkani, Network Director