Notice Of Intent To Sole Source By:

Vendor Name:

Contract Amount:

$57,000.00

Notice Publish Date:

January 3, 2023

Agency Procurement Manager:

Email:

Telephone:

The Agency hereby provides notice that it intends to enter into a sole source contract per S.C. Code Ann. §11-35-1560 with Vendor for the following supplies, services, information technology, or construction:

Clemson University seeks to purchase a custom designed and built 3D printer for ceramic research projects - specifically a Robocasting printing system from Robocasting Enterprises, LLC. The custom Robocasting platforms are designed to be mechanically robust to minimize compliance and spring-back during movement and feedstock delivery. The extrusion delivery system is designed with stiff metal sleeves which hold syringes of feedstock. The feedstock is extruded with a direct-drive piston which provides positive displacement of feedstock regardless of the pressure required for extrusion. Furthermore, robust motors with gear reducers are used to drive the piston for high torque and ultra-precise delivery of feedstock pastes regardless of viscosity and fast or slow extrusion rates. The combination of these features facilitates straight-forward printing of hundreds of feedstocks regardless of material properties and minimal dead-space and wasted R&D materials. The system also comes with proprietary GoldWing Software designed specifically for the robocasting process with user-friendly adjustment of parameters that are specifically relevant to the robocasting process. For example: extrusion nozzle size, extrusion rates, platform speeds, accelerations, and decelerations, parameters for under-filling or over-filling regions, layer thickness, overlap or underlap of deposited beads in XY directions, etc. The project at the University requires a system that can accurately deposit a variety of non-optimized feedstocks with very different properties and textures and the Robocasting Enterprises LLC system is believed to be the only system that can meet these requirements. For these reasons, this is a sole source procurement.

Agency's justification for a sole source procurement may be viewed or immediately obtained at:

SC Young - scy@clemson.edu

PROTESTS:
Any actual or prospective bidder, offeror, contractor, or subcontractor aggrieved in connection with the intended award or award of this sole source contract, shall notify the appropriate chief Procurement officer in writing of its intent to protest within five (5) business days of the date this notice is posted. Any actual or prospective bidder, offeror, contractor, or subcontractor who is aggrieved in connection with the intended award or award of this sole source contract and has timely notified the appropriate chief procurement officer of its intent to protest, may protest to the appropriate chief procurement officer in the manner set forth below within fifteen days of the date this notice is posted; except that a matter that could have been raised as a protest of the solicitation may not be raised as a protest of the award or intended award of a contract.
A protest must be in writing, filed with the appropriate chief procurement officer, and set forth the grounds of the protest and the relief requested with enough particularity to give notice of the issues to be decided. The protest must be received by the appropriate chief procurement officer within the time provided above. Days are calculated as provided in S.C. Code Ann. §11-35-310(13).

Any notice of intent to protest and protest must be addressed to the chief procurement officer:

Materials Management Officer

(a) by email to:

Protest-MMO@mmo.sc.gov

(b) by post or hand delivery to:

1201 Main Street, Suite 600, Columbia, SC 29201

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