The Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had a banner year in 2025. Working with partners from industry, academia and government, MDF earned multiple international awards, developed technologies that launched commercially and expanded tools that help industry strengthen American energy abundance.
The inaugural MDF Impact Report highlights these successes across multiple technology categories.
Here are five key takeaways from the report:
1. Record wins at the R&D 100 Awards
MDF helped ORNL set a new lab record for most wins at the R&D 100 Awards, a global competition highlighting the best innovations across the scientific community. This year, MDF led two award-winning projects: Future Foundries, which combines multiple manufacturing processes into a single platform, and Simurgh, an AI-powered tool for inspecting components for industries such as 3D-printing and nuclear energy. Additionally, MDF contributed to a R&D 100-winning General Motors project by developing DuAlumin3D, a next-generation aluminum alloy that was used in the company’s low-mass, high-efficiency, medium duty truck engine.
2. Printing an industry
ORNL’s long-term partnership with Lincoln Electric through MDF has helped develop and mature large-scale metal 3D printing processes such as wire-arc additive manufacturing, which melts and deposits metal wire in layers to build a component. The technology was used to make emergency repairs to the Poe Lock in Michigan, a vital structure for international shipping, avoiding an estimated $3 trillion in damage to the United States’ gross domestic product and the loss of around 33 million jobs. In 2025, the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Industrial Base Program, General Dynamics Electric Boat and Lincoln Electric announced an investment to integrate additive manufacturing into the construction of nuclear-powered submarines.
3. Building the future of nuclear reactor infrastructure
MDF initiated a “moonshot” with Kairos Power, Barnard Construction and the University of Maine to develop and validate large-scale, 3D-printed polymer composite forms for casting complex, high-precision concrete structures and enabling modular construction. A moonshot is a bold, high-risk effort to achieve a breakthrough that could fundamentally change what’s possible. Leveraging MDF’s partners throughout the supply chain, the forms were printed, machined, coated and delivered in just 14 days, a small fraction of the time required by traditional methods. The forms represented precursors to those that Kairos Power and Barnard will employ to construct structural support for the upcoming Hermes Demonstration Reactor Series.
4. Pioneering new techniques for large-scale 3D printing
Partnering with ARC Specialties, researchers developed the electroslag additive manufacturing system, or ESAM, to domestically produce infrastructure-scale equipment for energy installations. The 3D-printing system combines wire-arc additive manufacturing with a metal cladding process to create a low-cost method of rapidly producing high precision energy components weighing up to 50 tons. The technology was showcased live at FABTECH 2025, North America’s largest metal fabrication event, where researchers used a nickel-based superalloy to print a demonstration part at about three times the speed of a conventional wire-arc additive system.
5. Expanding digital tools for industry
Researchers convened industry stakeholders with SimCamp 2025, an interactive coding workshop that trained participants to use the physics-based modeling software developed at MDF and apply it to additive manufacturing problems. During the workshop, researchers showcased multiple tools for connecting to manufacturing data, automating workflows and modeling processes. The workshop received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with participants planning to use ORNL tools in their future work and commenting that the tools give their companies a competitive advantage.
The MDF, supported by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, is a nationwide consortium of collaborators working with ORNL to innovate, inspire and catalyze the transformation of U.S. manufacturing. Learn more about working with the MDF.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’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