Proceedings for the 2005 International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium. For more information about the symposium, please see the Solid Freeform Fabrication website.

The Sixteenth Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) Symposium, held at The University of Texas in Austin on August 1-3, 2005, was attended by 106 national and international researchers from twelve countries. Papers addressed SFF issues in computer software, machine design, materials synthesis and processing, and integrated manufacturing. The diverse domestic and foreign attendees included industrial users, SFF machine manufacturers, university researchers and representatives from the government. 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 process development, design tools, modeling and control, process parameter optimization, applications and materials. We believe that documenting the changing state of SFF art as represented by these Proceedings will serve both those presently involved in this fruitful technical area as well as new researchers and users entering the field.

This year’s best oral presentation was given by Nathan Crane of MIT. Selection is based on the overall quality of the paper, the presentation and discussion at the meeting, the significance of the work and the manuscript submitted to the proceedings. The paper title was, “Improving Accuracy of Powder Sintering-based SFF Processes by Metal Deposition from Nanoparticle Dispersion”. Selected from over 50 oral presentations, his presentation appears on Page 261 of this Proceedings. The best poster presentation selected from 11 posters was given by Kunnayut Eiamsa-ard from the University of Missouri-Rolla. The paper title was, “Part Repair using a Hybrid Manufacturing System” and appears on Page 425.

The editors would like to extend a warm “Thank You” to Rosalie Foster 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 are grateful to Bryan Blackmur and Cindy Pflughoft who helped with Proceedings production. We would like to thank the Organizing Committee, the session chairs, 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 (N00014-05-1-0789) and the National Science Foundation (DMI 0522509) for supporting this meeting financially. The meeting was co-organized by the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and the Mechanical Engineering Department, Laboratory for Freeform Fabrication and the Texas Materials Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.