A new manufacturing process developed by Skuld with support from the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is moving from research to commercial production, offering U.S. manufacturers a faster, tooling-free approach to producing complex metal castings.
In 2023, Sarah Jordan joined Innovation Crossroads to help mature Skuld’s process for combining additive manufacturing with a variation on investment casting known as lost foam casting. Veterans in the lost foam industry, Jordan and her cofounder, Mark DeBruin, formed Skuld because they saw the need for a faster, more efficient way to produce casted components close to their final shape without tooling.
Innovation Crossroads, one of four nodes of the DOE Office of Technology Commercialization's Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program, is a fellowship program for startup founders that embeds entrepreneurs with ORNL lab researchers to help translate early-stage technologies into viable commercial ventures
“Lost foam tooling historically was very expensive, so it was only used for automotive or high-volume applications where you could spread that cost over hundreds of thousands of parts,” Jordan said. “Additive manufacturing doesn’t require tooling and enables more complex geometries so is better able to compete against traditional manufacturing.”
In lost foam casting, workers produce the shape of a component using molded or machined foam, coat it with a thin ceramic layer and compact it in sand. Molten metal is then poured through a ceramic funnel, known as the downsprue, vaporizing the foam and filling the mold cavity with the foam’s exact shape.
Skuld’s process, known as additive manufacturing evaporative casting (AMEC), replaces the traditional foam with a 3D-printed material made from a biopolymer called polylactic acid (PLA). Unlike petroleum-based foams, PLA is derived from corn residue and other natural materials, making its fumes largely harmless when vaporized. However, switching from the low-density foam to a dense polymer presented technical challenges with gas buildup.
“When dense material evaporates, it produces far more gas because foam is only about 2 percent polymer by mass — the rest is already air,” said Adrian Sabau, senior researcher in the Multiscale Materials group.
Sometimes the gas builds up so quickly, Sabau said, it doesn’t have time to escape through the compacted sand as the molten metal flows into the mold. These gas pockets can cause serious issues, including voids in finished parts and, in some cases, dangerous molten spatter if gas backflows through the downsprue.
By developing computational models to track and simulate process conditions, researchers can investigate casting geometries to mitigate vapor buildup.
“The Innovation Crossroads program has been critical to both the technical and commercial success of the AMEC process. Without it, it’s possible that Skuld would have closed in the summer of 2023,” Jordan said. “Instead, we’ve grown to 25 employees, purchased a new 34,000-square-foot foundry and expect to reach about 20 million pounds of capacity once all our equipment is fully installed.”
“Innovation Crossroads was an asset for helping Skuld grow,” said Alex Roschli, a researcher at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL and primary investigator for the project. “They grew so fast that we were able to partner with them on a separate project to develop a mobile foundry for defense applications. The program helped establish a strong partnership that allowed us to solve multiple problems quickly.”
Skuld is now producing cast components for U.S. industry using the AMEC process, and has begun selling AMEC systems to other manufacturers, extending the project’s impact on the U.S. industrial base.
In early 2025, Skuld was selected as one of the winners of a $6.6 million project call funded by the Office of the Secretary of Defense Manufacturing Technology Program, which responds to the manufacturing technology needs of the Department of War. The Rapid Casting Demonstration Challenge is part of a larger project, Improvements in Manufacturing Productivity via Additive Capabilities and Techno-Economic Analysis 2.0, aimed at improving casting and forging operations through additive manufacturing technologies.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. – Logan Korn
