WIDE ARRAY
These parts were made using additive manu- facturing, which creates plastic items and other durable components by adding material, layer by layer, using 3D printers. Depend- ing on the process used, wire, polymer filament, powders, liquids, gels, mixtures of glues and materials, and slurries can produce components. (U.S. Army photo)
Most often, the complex objects that we manufacture today are made up of lots of smaller, much less complex parts made in bulk, then fastened together. Each of those pieces needs to be cast or machined or forged or milled, and then someone has to assemble them. Additive manufactur- ing is most intriguing because it makes things holistically, with all the parts built together as one, and can potentially trans- form hundreds or even thousands of parts into just a few. At the very least, this opens up the possibility of much quicker proto- types, which has the Army excited.
Mike Nikodinovski, mechanical engineer and additive manufacturing expert in the Materials Division at the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, said that an example he often uses to demonstrate the differ- ence between legacy manufacturing and additive is a hole.
“If you drill a hole in a part,” he said, “usually it’s in a straight line because that’s the only thing that you can do with a drill,” he said, “But additive doesn’t care about that. If I want that hole to be twisty and do different things, now, designers … can design for something different, because
the limitations of traditional manufac- turing are gone. Now they can say, ‘I can do all these crazy different things.’ ” Tat’s one of the benefits, but also one of the problems. Sometimes it makes sense to do something completely outside any box ever made, but other times, not so much.
It’s more than a radical change when everything you know about how to design and build an object are out the window.
“When you deal with a material that’s been forged or cast for centuries, there are a lot of assumptions built into the selection of the material and the manu- facturing method,” said Dr. William Benard, senior campaign scientist in materials development with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland. According to Benard, ARL’s research and development portfo- lio is divided into campaigns that reflect the Army’s priorities. Senior campaign scientists work across the organization to develop and coordinate research strat- egy and to communicate and interface with the broader research communi- ties—DOD, national labs, industry and academia.
Tat deep institutional and engineering muscle memory in manufacturing simply does not exist in additive, which has only been with us since the mid-1980s. Tat’s not much more than a couple of ticks of the historical clock compared with the thousands of years that humans have been casting, forging, cutting, milling and drilling.
“Tat’s where we really have to do the research to understand how the materi- als behave differently,” Benard said. “It’s not that they’re so fundamentally differ- ent, it’s just building up the knowledge base that we have with other manufactur- ing methods.”
Not only that, said Benard, “I think the scale of the design space that is opened up makes it very challenging to develop good intuition. Tis is one of the areas we are working on—design tools to manage complexity and help identify non-intuitive optimal designs. Te tools have to address the complexity of selecting and placing different materials in a volume, or modu- lating the material properties, to satisfy constraints and performance objectives that exist in multiple intersecting fields and dimensions—for example, looking
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ASC.ARMY.MIL 93
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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