PNNL Designs Extrusion Retrofit System to Help Manufacturers Get into ShAPE

A new invention from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) could soon help manufacturers more easily adopt the Lab’s patented Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion (ShAPE™) technology, enabling faster manufacturing of superior extrusion products.

Every day, across the United States, conventional extrusion presses use a century-old process to soften and extrude metal to produce everything from aluminum tubing for sporting goods and automotive structures to zirconium tubing for the nuclear industry. Innovation in extrusion technology has stagnated for decades, leaving these manufacturers with inefficiencies that increase energy costs and limit product performance.

PNNL’s streamlined ShAPE technology eschews many of these limitations and inefficiencies—most notably, the indiscriminate heating of the metal—by using friction produced by shear to precisely soften the metal right at the point of extrusion. This straightforward, yet more surgical approach allows ShAPE to extrude materials and components with superior properties while reducing costs and energy use. Over the course of developing ShAPE, researchers at PNNL have used the technique to produce automotive components, ultra-conductors, key materials for national security, and more.

Despite its advantages, ShAPE’s commercial adoption has been limited by some hard-to-avoid factors. Extrusion presses (whether conventional or ShAPE) are big, expensive, and (for the most part) manufactured overseas. That combination is a tough sell for many domestic manufacturers, especially those who have already invested in capital-intensive conventional extrusion systems.

Now, PNNL has a solution: the Lab has unveiled ShAPEretro™, a drop-in upgrade module for existing conventional extrusion presses that could unlock the ability to perform extrusions unique to ShAPE.

The new retrofit system will enable domestic manufacturers to produce higher-quality products at lower costs without the expense and difficulty of acquiring and operating a new, stand-alone extrusion system.

Developing ShAPEretro

“When discussing the challenge of commercial adoption, we came up with an idea. What if we could take that existing fleet of traditional extrusion presses across the U.S. manufacturing sector and retrofit them?” said Darrell Herling, PNNL’s program manager for transportation technologies and manufacturing supply chains.

Think pasta-making or Play-Doh^® Fun-Press: when a material is extruded, it’s pressed through an opening in a die to create the desired shape. In commercial extrusion presses, these dies are frequently swapped out because of normal wear and tear or changing production needs. As a result, many presses have their die systems attached to a “die slide,” a hydraulic system that moves the entire die apparatus in and out of the machine for easy swapping.

In the die pocket and die slide, PNNL’s ShAPE team saw an opportunity: the perfect spot for a minimally invasive retrofit. The researchers realized that they could transform how the entire extrusion press operated using a space already designed to accommodate swapping in new hardware.

“We invented a ShAPE retrofit system, which we call ShAPEretro, that drops into the die pocket in a traditional commercial extrusion press,” Herling said. “Once dropped in, ShAPEretro is able to rotate the die assembly, which creates ShAPE’s namesake shear and effectively converts the press into a ShAPE system.”

ShAPEretro’s roles in the retrofitted system are straightforward: add the rotational axis and manage alignment during extrusion. The module is designed specifically for direct extrusion (pressing the material into the die), the most common type of extrusion in commercial manufacturing.

Getting into ShAPE

Once the ShAPEretro concept had been fleshed out, the PNNL team built a prototype ShAPEretro system and demonstrated its efficacy. The prototype module was installed and demonstrated on ShAPE 2, the Lab’s largest general-purpose extrusion system. 

Initial tests focused on extruding aluminum tubing and showed promising results, Herling said. So far, ShAPEretro produces extrusions comparable to those produced by a full, dedicated ShAPE machine, though Herling noted that ShAPEretro might not be suitable for all materials and products.

Following the successful trial runs, PNNL is seeking industrial partners interested in taking ShAPEretro for a spin in a conventional extrusion system.

“The next step is to work with a manufacturer to fabricate a full-scale ShAPEretro system based on PNNL’s designs and conduct a trial deployment of that module on a full extrusion machine,” Herling said. 

A competitive edge for domestic manufacturing

“ShAPEretro opens the ShAPE process to far more manufacturers,” Herling said. “The domestic manufacturing industry will now be able to leverage ShAPE’s unique, superior properties and process efficiencies, utilizing the capital they’ve already invested in with minimal impact to their operations and process flow.”

The superior properties unlocked by ShAPE also enable the production of next-generation components that are not readily manufacturable by conventional extrusion presses. Many ShAPE-enabled components—like 100-percent recycled high-quality aluminum parts or ultra-conductive materials for grid applications—provide pathways for securing supply chains of critical materials through domestic upcycling of scrap metal that might otherwise be exported.

Thanks to ShAPEretro, these products, and others, could now be within reach for domestic manufacturers.

“Right now, only 50–60 percent of the installed capacity for extrusion in the U.S. is actually being utilized,” Herling said. “That means there’s a lot of space to produce additional products that are higher-end, higher-value. ShAPEretro could enable those extrusion companies to do things that aren’t feasible on their existing conventional extrusion equipment.”

The development and application of ShAPE technology has been funded by PNNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, as well as applied program offices across the Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation and Office of Electricity. The development of ShAPEretro was funded by PNNL’s Office of Collaboration and Commercialization’s Lab-Directed Technology Maturation Fund. For research collaboration and commercialization inquiries, contact commercialization@pnnl.gov.