Te beauty of this approach is that changes in the tooling process don’t require an engineering change.
“You can get quick turnaround on tooling. Te design process takes place, but the manufacturing can take place in days instead of weeks,” as opposed to the traditional way that tooling has to get up to speed for manufacturing, Flinn said. “For prototyp- ing or for mainstream manufacturing, I can have a tool made [additively] and up and running in 24 hours. We’ve experienced that here [at Rock Island] on a process where we were getting 50 percent scrap. We changed the tooling on it and basically elimi- nated the scrap completely.”
Tis business of figuring out where the additive sweet spot lies is one of the things that REF’s Ex Lab and RDECOM’s R-FAB are helping the Army understand, either inside or outside the battlespace, Phillis said.
“What missions can we solve? We’re finding all kinds of things. Humvees are being dead-lined because they don’t have gas caps. Or the gas cap breaks. When they order it, they’ve got to sit there for 30 days or 45 days or however long it takes to get that through the supply system.
“If we can produce it in a couple of hours, now we’ve got a truck that’s ready for use while we’re waiting for the supply system to catch up. And that’s the big piece that we always want to empha- size, that this is for emergency repair or temporary missions only. We are not doing field printing to replace” the manufacturer, he said. Tat can only be done to supplement the supply system and with the maker’s knowledge. Any time a Soldier wants to engage R-FAB, the part must be ordered through the supply system before R-FAB can produce a replacement.
Tat shows where additive technology is useful. It shows not just how the discipline can work for the Army, but where it should work. R-FAB wants to know where additive manufacturing has intervened to help readiness.
CONCLUSION Conventional manufacturing has been around since the dawn of time. Additive has been here for about 25 years, and that shiny surface of possibility has scarcely been scratched.
Right now, one of the major impediments to additive is physics itself. Tere is only so hot you can make a polymer, only so fast you can squeeze it out of a nozzle.
“Tere are definitely physical limits [to additive manufacturing]. I can only pump so much laser power into a metal-powder bed without burning everything up. Inputting too much heat can cause a distortion and the whole thing just melts away,” said AMRDEC’s Gaddes.
“In every different type of additive process, they have some sort of physical limitation that’s associated with them. … Most of the materials that we’re manufacturing [with] right now are not really designed for additive. Tey’re legacy materials.” For exam- ple, a nickel-based alloy, Inconel 718, “is a welding alloy, which makes it relatively easy to additively manufacture, but it really wasn’t designed for additive.”
Te big breakthroughs in additive seem most likely to come with new materials and processes and new design tools. “When we start designing our materials for additive manufacturing, that’s when you can really start to see some performance gains, I believe,” Gaddes said.
Additive manufacturing will allow Soldiers deployed in remote outposts around the world to print virtually anything they need, from food to shelter to weapons, or even new skin cells to repair burned skin. Efforts are underway to create replacement body parts and custom-made medical devices.
Te replicator from “Star Trek” worked by rearranging mole- cules to create whatever was needed. We’re a long way from that, but the Army, as Perconti noted, is working to “develop the additive manufacturing tools that will leverage machine learn- ing, information-fusion capabilities and the like to seamlessly integrate various designs, various digital manufacturing tech- niques and to bring things all the way from concept to final design in the components, quickly and inexpensively.” Tat’s the Army’s future.
For more information on the Army’s additive center of excellence, go to
https://www.dvidshub.net/news/297208/ria-jmtc-hosts- amc-summit-discuss-additive-manufacturing-way-forward.
STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military and S&T, he is the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health- oriented books and an award-winning novelist. He is Level II certified in program management.
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