Proceedings for the 2003 International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium. For more information about the symposium, please see the Solid Freeform Fabrication website.

The Fourteenth Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) Symposium, held at The University of Texas in Austin on August 4-6, 2003, was attended by over 100 national and international researchers from fourteen 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 is the first year for authors to elect to have their manuscript submissions rigorously reviewed as refereed submissions. At least two external reviewers assessed these manuscripts. Rejected manuscripts and manuscripts with mandatory revisions that were not revised have been included in the proceedings as unreviewed. There are a number of excellent manuscripts in the Proceedings for which the authors opted not to be reviewed. Reviewed manuscripts are noted as such before the paper abstract along with the date of acceptance.

The Organizing Committee held a best paper competition for the first time this year. Both oral presentations and the poster presentations were judged by at least two independent reviewers. The criteria included clarity of presentation as well as quality, significance and soundness of the research. The best oral presentation was awarded to Morgan Larsson from Arcam AB (Germany) who gave the paper “Rapid Manufacturing with Electron Beam Melting (EBM) – A Manufacturing Revolution?” The best poster presentation was awarded to Kun Dai, Xiaoxuan Li and Leon L. Shaw from the University of Connecticut-Storrs for the presentation entitled, “Comparisons Between Thermal Modeling and Experiments in Laser-Densified Dental Powder Bodies”.

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 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 Ralph Wachter and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0913) 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.