Assoc Prof Wentao Yan and his team emerged among the top performers at the Additive Manufacturing (AM) Benchmark Challenge 2025, securing 9 awards in a field of 24 groups from around the world.
Held under the NIST-led Additive Manufacturing Benchmark Test Series (AM Bench), the challenge drew 84 entries across 19 challenge problems. Institutions including NASA Langley Research Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock contributed to the platform, which tests how accurately researchers can predict additive manufacturing processes and outcomes against carefully controlled experimental data.
The team secured 3 First Place, 4 Second Place and 2 Honourable Mention awards, accounting for 9 of the 25 awards presented in total.
Reflecting on the challenge, he said, “What makes the challenge difficult is that we need to predict complex additive manufacturing process and outcomes first-time-right without experimental calibration. The team’s strong performance was driven by our consistent emphasis on physically rigorous and generalisable models rooted in fundamental theory and numerical implementation, instead of hard-fitting and tunings. This makes our model accurate and reliable across various conditions.”
With 9 awards across multiple challenge areas, the team stood out among this year’s strongest performers at AM Bench 2025.
