Proceedings for the 1998 International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium. For more information about the symposium, please see the Solid Freeform Fabrication website.

The Ninth Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) Symposium, held at The University of Texas in Austin on August 10- 12, 1998, was attended by over 150 national and international researchers. Papers addressed SFF issues in computer software, machine design, materials synthesis and processing, and integrated manufacturing. New sessions on ceramic materials and multiple materials SFF were added to this year's program. The diverse domestic and foreign attendees included industrial users, SFF machine manufacturers, university researchers and representatives from the government. We are pleased once again with the strong showing of university students. The excitement generated at the Symposium reflects the participants' total involvement in SFF and the future technical health of this growing technology. The Symposium organizers look forward to its being a continuing forum for technical exchange among the expanding body of researchers involved in SFF.

The Symposium was again organized in a manner to allow the multi-disciplinary nature of the SFF research to be presented coherently, with various sessions emphasizing computer issues, machine topics, and the variety of materials aspects of SFF. We believe that documenting the changing state of SFF art as represented by these Proceedings will serve both the people presently involved in this fruitful technical area as well as new researchers and users entering the field.

The editors would like to extend a warm "Thank You" to Glorya Gutchess for her detailed handling of the logistics of the meeting and the Proceedings, as well as her excellent performance as registrar and problem solver during the meeting. We would like to thank the organizing committee, the session chairmen, the attendees for their enthusiastic contributions, and the speakers both for their significant contribution to the meeting and for the relatively prompt delivery of the manuscripts comprising this volume. We look forward to the continued close cooperation of the SFF community in organizing the Symposium. We also want to thank the Office of Naval Research (Grant No. NO00 14-96- 1-044 1) and the National Science Foundation (Grant DM- 98 12084) for supporting this meeting financially. Other co-sponsors included DARPA, The Rapid Prototyping Association of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, and the University of Connecticut at Storrs along with the Mechanical Engineering Department, Laboratory for Freeform Fabrication and the Texas Materials Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.