the people who are going to touch and run the machines, but train the troops and the engineers on the capabilities of and how to design for AM.”
Additive is so fundamentally different in nearly every aspect, the training is critical. (See sidebar, “Tinking in Volumes,” Page 84.)
“You’ve got to train the Soldier on the capabilities of the tech- nology along with how to actually use the machine,” Flinn said,
“Ten there’s how to teach the design community themselves the benefits of additive so they can start designing for it.”
According to Megan Krieger, mechanical engineer at the Engi- neer Research and Development Center, her organization has
“a project through Makerspace for installations, so not quite as advanced as what we’re talking about, but we’re able to get maker spaces into the MWRs [morale, welfare and recreation facili- ties] at libraries, basically across all installations in order to teach the fundamental hobbyist perspective.” Tat, Krieger said in an interview, is “so that people, when they get into their [military occupational specialty] where they use additive manufacturing, they’re already a little bit familiar with the technology, because if people are passionate about making things, they’ll learn it a lot better than if they’re just thrown into it.”
Te Army still isn’t 100 percent certain where additive belongs, although it has lots of ideas. Nor is it possible to fully grasp what additive will be able to do in the near-, mid- or far-term. Te disci- pline is, as Perconti noted, at a pivotal stage in its development. Tere is much the Army needs: materials developed for additive,
DISCUSSING THE PROCESS
Dr. Patrick Fowler, right, former lead engineer of the Ex Lab in Afghan- istan, works with a Soldier on an idea for a materiel solution. Soldier training will be an important part of Army efforts to incorporate addi- tive manufacturing—not only training those who will operate the machines, but showing Soldiers and engineers how to design for it.
and the design tools necessary to both limit the inherent possi- bilities and exploit them.
MATERIALS SCIENCE
“Tere are different levels of challenge within [additive manufac- turing],” said Dr. William Benard, senior campaign scientist in materials development with ARL in Adelphi, Maryland, in an interview.
“Te Army’s near-term efforts are looking at readiness, and in research, one of the simpler things is to just design new materi- als that are easier to print with, more reliable to print with, [the] properties are well understood—that kind of thing as a substi- tute, sort of a more direct approach to support of existing parts.
“One of the areas of investment that ARL is making to support this, and I know others in the RDECOM community are looking at it as well, is, really, new design tools for additive,” Benard said.
Tat effort is “basically to handle the complexity of new materi- als, understanding how they’re going to work, mixing materials, changing the properties as a function of location—that’s for really high-performance parts. And that’s sort of the long-term vision. You have the near-term, which is replacing what already exists, and then the mid-term … which is consolidation of parts, but it’s essentially a functional equivalence of some assembly that we have. And then the longer-term view is designing things for additive, taking full advantage of this new geometric space. Te far term is what can we get by mixing and modulating materi- als in sort of a voxelized fashion. Now, that’s way down the road,
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