Metals are indispensable to the modern economy and remain natural choices for structural applications due to their toughness, corrosion resistance, thermal and electrical conductivity, and recyclability. Among structural metals, aluminum is particularly important because of its high specific strength and widespread adoption across transportation, construction, electrical, electronic, aerospace, and marine sectors. Metal recycling is essential for green manufacturing, yet conventional routes remain energy-intensive and complex. Reducing the carbon footprint of metal manufacturing requires the development of greener and more efficient recycling methods. To address this and other applications, Enabled Engineering has developed and patented SolidStir®, bridging critical technology gaps in metal additive manufacturing (AM), extrusion, and recycling. This is a next-generation, solid-state AM, extrusion, and recycling platform, leveraging principles of friction stir welding and enabling capabilities engineered for high performance and sustainability. The parts produced with this technology are composed of fully dense, consolidated deposits using AM. The parts have superior interlayer bonding with wrought metal microstructures and properties due to dynamically recrystallized microstructure.

Our advanced AM technology is ideally suited for DOD expeditionary applications where vehicle and equipment repair is hampered by the availability of appropriate feedstock in the field (such as remote locations, at sea, or on aircraft) as well as for industrial scale automotive aluminum recycling where new parts can be deposited or extruded from aluminum scrap. Our technology is feedstock agnostic, utilizing powder, chips, rods, and even old or broken, cut-up components. Thus, supply chain disruption is minimized. Also, since our technology can be installed on existing CNC machines, it is inherently resilient and scalable from tabletop machines to large gantry systems.

Both SolidStir® AM and extrusion can be performed on a single CNC machine with a slight change in configuration of the tooling. Both processes consist of a rotating non-consumable stirring tool housed within a stationary processing chamber equipped with feed ports. The rotating tool attaches to the CNC machine’s spindle. During the operation, the feedstock interacts with the non-consumable rotating stirring tool and gets plasticized and consolidated inside the chamber. In the extrusion operation, the stirring tool tip is placed above the die throat which allows the consolidated and plasticized material to pass through the die as a continuous extrudate. In the AM operation, the stirring tool end is configured to extend past the die throat, allowing welding of the plasticized material, contained between the non-rotating shoulder and substrate, continuously for layer wise deposition. The extended tool ensures sufficient material mixing at the layer interfaces. The operation is very clean, safe, and requires no lubrication. SolidStir® technologies do not release harmful chemical wastes and are 50% more energy efficient than fusion-based technologies. Enabled Engineering’s SolidStir® technologies are suitable for large and medium-size component manufacturing and repairing. SolidStir®’s ability to retrofit onto existing machines lowers adoption costs, and helps rapidly expand the manufacturing capacity, reducing the lead time from 6 months to 6 weeks. SolidStir® will potentially reduce the current lead time of 2 years for large forgings and castings down to 2 weeks.