COMPLEX GEOMETRY
HAVE ADDITIVE, WILL TRAVEL
The REF Ex Lab at Bagram Airfield produced these items after Ex Lab engineers worked with Soldiers to develop solutions to problems they encountered. Additive manu- facturing has the promise to allow Soldiers deployed in remote outposts around the world to print virtually anything they need— shelter, weapons, even medical devices.
“It’s not like you can just press a button and go. Tere’s a lot of engineering involved on both sides of it. Even the design of your build-layout is going to involve some iteration of getting your layout just such that the part prints correctly,” Olson said.
“Tat’s one of the challenges,” said Rock Island’s Flinn. “How much test and evaluation is going to be needed, and how willing are engineers going to be to approve a requested change without it? With manufacturers saying that AM powder metal is simi- lar to casting in strength, the push for approval is only going to grow. Yet AM material specifications are still being developed, so the engineering community has little data to verify those claims, and testing each individual component will just delay accep- tance of AM.” Tat doesn’t even take equipment variations into account. “Process and equipment variation in metal printing is such that certification of individual machines is pretty much a requirement,” Flinn said.
Another challenge is the variety of different ways to print metal, which is where the Army wants to go. Te kinds of metal printing change all the time, RDECOM’s Phillis said, “because people are always coming up with new ideas. From a commercial standpoint, you’ve got the laser-powder bed. You’ve got things like Desktop Metal and Markforged, where they’re extruding a metal powder as part of a filament like a polymer filament to make a part. You’ve got binder-jetting, which is like glue and metal that gets put into a
82 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2019
sintering oven. Tat goes through a couple of processes where it finally gets sintered. HP just came out with one that’s simi- lar. And then you have deposition, where you just spray powder or wire into a laser or plasma [heat source] and that melts, like [using] a large welder. People are coming up with different stuff. Tose [in addition to metal and ceramic slurry printing] are what’s commercially available right now. Universities may be working on something completely different. Tat’s what makes it a prob- lem. Tere’s not just one technology that can do it all. Tere are many different technologies.”
THE ADDITIVE SWEET SPOT Te Army stood up its Additive and Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence at the Rock Island Arsenal Joint Manufac- turing and Technology Center to establish the organizational structure, with the attendant policies, equipment and method- ologies to immediately address Army readiness. It will also aid in the growth of additive manufacturing in the Army organic indus- trial base by developing the business case for it, according to Flinn.
“Right now, the big win for additive manufacturing is tooling,” he said. “I’m talking about tool holders, fixtures, patterns, invest- ment and injection molds, assembly aids; all that stuff that’s tied to traditional manufacturing that people don’t immediately think about when they think AM. Yet the time and cost savings in tool- ing can provide breakthroughs in meeting readiness,” he said.
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