WHAT’S NEXT?
Dr. Patrick Fowler, now with RDECOM, draws on his experience as lead engineer of the Ex Lab at Bagram Airfield to explore agile manufacturing and material processing programs with the goal of harnessing breakthroughs for rapid prototyping and development.
FROM DUST IT CAME To get things to work as expected and up to Army standards is no simple task. AMRDEC has been working with General Elec- tric Co. to produce parts for the T700 motor, which powers the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters.
“It’s kind of like a demonstrator project for additively produc- ing significant engine components,” said Kathy Olson, additive manufacturing lead in the Manufacturing Science and Tech- nology Division of the U.S. Army Manufacturing Technology program at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, in an interview. “Tere’s been some successes already with doing full builds of the parts,” she continued. Te project is mainly geared toward gaining knowledge, she said, so the part won’t be part of a helicopter that Soldiers are flying. Yet.
In part, that’s because the motor parts have not been tested and qualified at the Army’s standards. “It’s more of a knowledge tran- sition,” Olson said. It’s intended to show “that we can build these significant parts.”
AMRDEC produces each part on a laser-powder bed machine, then goes post-production. Jeff Gaddes, mechanical engineer and Olson’s colleague at AMRDEC, described the production process for using the machine that produces the metal parts. “We spread a layer of powder over a plate. It’s very even, basically like a windshield wiper. So you wipe that powder across so you’ve got a nice thin, consistent layer of powder, and then your laser comes in, melts where it needs to melt, so you’ve got regions of melted powder and regions of unmelted powder. Ten you drop your build-plate down a little, and then you wipe powder over
the whole deal, so you’ve got fresh powder covering the entire bed,” he said.
“You have a high-powered laser that comes in and selectively melts [and fuses] regions of that, and you wipe more powder across and the laser will come in and selectively melt regions of that.” Each layer the machine adds is a slice of the digital design. As the process continues, the “volume” that holds the powder and the part fills up.”
“In the end,” Gaddes continued, “you take it out of the machine, shake the loose powder off and you’ve got your final part. Ten about 70 percent of the work is in the post-processing, remov- ing the powder, post-[processing] heat treatment, machining it if necessary, removing it from the build plate—that type of work.” Te metal dust that’s left can be reused.
Having a finished part is not the same thing as being able to use the finished part, Olson emphasized. Te part has to be qualified, a process that assures that the part meets quality standards. Qual- ifying a part is no simple matter. Te materials have to meet the Army’s standards, and so does the machine that’s making the part.
To qualify a part made with additive, “you’ll go through the process of qualifying your material and writing your material [specifications] for whatever material you’re going to use,” she said. “Ten you have to qualify your machine and make sure it’s producing repeatable parts, and then qualify the process for the part that you’re building, because you’ll have likely differ- ent parameter sets for your different geometries for the different parts [that] you’re going to build.
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