Ryan Penny

Ryan is a PhD student in mechanical engineering whose research is focused on the development of in-situ instrumentation and measurement techniques for end-to-end interrogation of selective laser melting (SLM) additive manufacturing. He has designed, built, and integrated two optical instruments with an SLM testbed: a mid-wave infrared (MWIR) camera that images thermal (blackbody) radiation from the build area and a near IR (NIR) pyrometer that measures the temperature of material directly at the laser’s focus. Determining the mathematical correspondence between a process signature and a component property (e.g. thermal radiance and density, respectively) is established by geometrically aligning the datasets using a metric of cross-predictive power between the datasets known as mutual information (MI). He is using the Signal Processing Toolbox to relate different process signatures to SLM component properties, including density, metallurgical grain size, and residual stress. Ryan earned a BS in electrical engineering and physics from Northeastern University and an SM in mechanical engineering from MIT.