Proceedings for the 2006 International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium. For more information about the symposium, please see the Solid Freeform Fabrication website.

The Seventeenth Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) Symposium, held at The University of Texas in Austin on August 14-16, 2006, was attended by 101 national and international researchers from ten 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, “Repeatability Analysis of 304L Deposition by the LENS® Process”, was given by David Gill from Sandia National Laboratories-New Mexico, (co-authors John Smugeresky and Clinton J. Atwood). Selection was 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. Selected from over 60 oral presentations, his presentation appears on Page 770 of this Proceedings. The best poster presentation selected from 14 posters was given by Hongyi Yang of the University of London (co-authors Xiaopeng Chi, Shoufeng Yang and Julian R. G. Evans). The paper title was, “Direct Extrusion Freeforming of Ceramic Pastes”. The article appears on Page 304.

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 Naval Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation (DMI- 0621169s) 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.