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Naval Research Interested In Bringing 3D Printing To Large Scale For Ships

Posted by samzenpus on from the print-and-fire dept.

coondoggie writes: The Navy this month will outline what it is looking for from additive manufacturing or 3D printing technology as way to bolster what it terms "fleet readiness." The Office of Naval Research will on July 15 detail its Quality Metal Additive Manufacturing (Quality MADE) program that will aim to "develop and integrate the suite of additive manufacturing software and hardware tools required to ensure that critical metallic components can be consistently produced and rapidly qualified in a cost effective manner."

44 comments

  1. I can see it now by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 3, Funny
    "Scotty - we need the temporal distortion generator up and running soon. You have 15 minutes!"

    "But Captain! the 3d printers canna take much more if this! They're overheatin' already!"

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    1. Re:I can see it now by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      In Live Free of Die, humanity buys a replication device and some older weapon plans from some advanced aliens for war against other, less-advanced aliens.

      They divide its time between producing cool stuff and cloning itself. Very RTS-like strategizing.

      Of course with enough replications, you can have an army of replicators spitting out ships like the Starforge, no Force assist needed.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    2. Re:I can see it now by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      Of course with enough replications, you can have an army of replicators spitting out ships like the Starforge, no Force assist needed.

      You post got me to thinking. Imagine if you would, the ability to reproduce an F1 rocket engine.

      That might not be the best example, but the ability to reproduce items ala carte, especially in a military context, would greately extend the lifetimes of the systems. So much superannuation is based on lack of replacement parts.

      So imagine the ability to reproduce a Saturn 5, replete with incremental improvements. The same with an F-14 Tomcat. or A10 Thunderbolt.

      Those are just a couple examples of some fine devices that suffered from getting old, not getting bad.

      Side note, the Warthog is still around, but there's some rumbling about retireing it. We should just ask the pilots of that ugly bitch or the ground forces they protect if that's a good idea.

      Similar opportunities exist in the civil area - I'm pretty excited the Navy is getting into this though

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    3. Re:I can see it now by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Imagine if you would, the ability to reproduce an F1 rocket engine.

      That's what Dynetics is trying with the F-1B project... With 8 MN of liftoff thrusts, despite the other projects in the works (the Falcons, Vulcan, the mythical Blue Origin launcher), it could still make for an interesting single-stick launcher.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:I can see it now by TheGavster · · Score: 3, Informative

      The metal bits aren't what go obsolete. The tooling to produce the engines, the frames, the aerodynamic surfaces were destroyed only after the planes were retired. 3D printing doesn't help build microchips, wiring boards, etc.

      Could some of those parts have been produced better with 3D printing? Sure. Particularly inside the engines, there are very complex forms that are difficult to make subtractively. But the whole plane? Big simple forms are far stronger and consistent when stamped from rolled stock than sintered up from powder.

      The reason those planes were retired is that new requirements emerged, and it was decided (rightly or wrongly) that a new design was the right way to meet them.

      --
      "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
    5. Re:I can see it now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In Live Free of Die, humanity buys a replication device and some older weapon plans from some advanced aliens for war against other, less-advanced aliens.

      No they don't, not in Live Free or Die. Are you thinking of some other book?

    6. Re:I can see it now by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      Sounds like Terrans buying weapon plans from the Protoss to fight the Zerg.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    7. Re:I can see it now by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      It's true that 3d printing isn't going to solve all your problems; but some are likely to prove hairier than others:

      Microchips are a pretty nasty case. Between long development cycles and the demand for mil/aero rated and otherwise hardened versions, military gear is quite likely to be riddled with already-obsolete parts by the time it is formally declared 'finished', much less when the Block N variant is still in use 30 years later. Unfortunately, fully accurate emulation of even relatively feeble digital ICs can be fairly tricky(just look at how much effort it takes to get a 100% binary compatible emulation of the NES' less-than-heroic 1.8MHz 6502; never mind newer stuff or analog/mixed signal); and even painfully obsolete IC fab processes are orders of magnitude smaller than alternate fabrication technologies are good for.

      Boards and wiring harnesses are also less likely to be amenable to 'just press print and away you go'; but unless you've destroyed the schematics and for some reason can't tell your multimeter minions to trace it out; such relatively large assemblies should be easier to reverse engineer if necessary and rebuild as well or better with modern parts.

      Parts, depending on their size, may or may not be amenable to direct 3d printing: if you go with the really fancy processes, smallish parts with comparatively obnoxious-to-machine properties might actually be easier to print than to produce by the original methods. In other cases, you might not 3d print the parts directly; but you could use 3d printing to greatly speed up the re-creation of tooling necessary to fabricate parts(sintered copper, say, is not terribly useful as an aerospace material; but if you need some tooling in stainless steel or another material that's a pain in the ass to machine precisely, being able to sinter copper to your preference, and then do sinker EDM could save you a great deal of time.)

      I suspect that some older designs, unless we consider them worth a fully reverse-engineering, are now too ill-documented to be revived; but given that any current design(and probably some moderately old ones) do have CAD representations produced during design and construction, suitably robust printing technology, in combination with some other techniques, we aren't going to just nanofab them all in one piece), does hold promise.

      Except for ICs, not sure what is to be done about those. Given economies of scale in the IC market; it might actually be easiest just to adopt the brute-force-and-ignorance approach and order 100x or even 1000x as many as you need, when constructing a system approved for service, just in case it ends up lasting a long time. Yeah, it will look wasteful, and some of the time it will be a waste; but economies of scale will soften the blow a bit; and you'll be saved having to source second or third hand ICs scavenged out of e-waste by the Chinese and fraudulently re-marked as new old stock; which is probably a good thing for system reliability.

    8. Re:I can see it now by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      the V-Force was retired with no replacements even planned, never mind implemented. Same as we're seeing now with our carriers. And our combat air wings.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    9. Re:I can see it now by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      the 65xx series are still being manufactured. You can get a 40-pin DIL package for change out of thirty Dollars.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    10. Re:I can see it now by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      sounds like a subplot for Homeworld.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    11. Re:I can see it now by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can see a ships hull being printed in one piece but a lot of plane parts are made from drop forged metal because it's the only way they can be made both strong enough and light enough to fly, I assume jet engines have a lot of drop forged parts for similar reasons, 3D printers are not going to replace drop forges any day soon. Also the skin of an aircraft is not like the skin of a car, commercial aircraft use a laminated skin to make it more resistant to tearing when the skin is broken at high speed.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    12. Re:I can see it now by oobayly · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Other components -such as gas turbine engine blades - are required to made from a single crystal of metal, for strength and resistance against thermal creep. If I recall correctly, the crystal is essential "grown" in the manufacturing process. It's unlikely that 3d printing will ever suffice for certain components. That said, there are thousands of components that could benefit from 3d printing.

    13. Re:I can see it now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      and even painfully obsolete IC fab processes are orders of magnitude smaller than alternate fabrication technologies are good for.

      Plenty of those "painfully obsolete" processes are still in operation at universities and analog manufacturers around the country, and modern E-beam litho systems can produce replacement mask sets much cheaper than the original E-beam mask writers. Also those original E-beam mask writers are still in operation, and are far cheaper to operate now that they have been fully depreciated, and had their old PDP-11 guts ripped out and replaced with COTS PCs with emulator IO boards. Old E-beam writers are almost never scrapped; instead they are upgraded with better focusing controls, pattern generators and put to use on low volume direct write manufacturing or producing masks for MEMS, Analog, Mixed-signal etc.

      Also with any luck, someone has put the masksets (or the GDS files) away in a safe somewhere, you just need to find a compatible stepper (and the process parameters) and you can run through another batch. Any lithography that predates VLSI and standard graphics formats like GDS or CIF is within the capabilities of a skilled hobbyist with a CMP and a metallurgical microscope to reverse engineer. The hardest part without a mask set, process parameters, or polygon files, is figuring out where the doping goes. You can "see" the doping with an Xray diffraction microscope, but otherwise you have to intuit it by mapping out the layers and knowing the design methodology. In NMOS this is kind of obvious, in CMOS, you can tell the PMOS devices because they are the bigger ones (2-3x the size, typically).

    14. Re:I can see it now by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      ...and yet, manufacturers are considering printing the blades anyway, or are already doing it (GE?).

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    15. Re:I can see it now by oobayly · · Score: 1

      I wasn't aware of that - it'll be interesting to see how they get that to work. Sometimes I wish I actually made it into the aerospace industry - they do some pretty cool stuff.

    16. Re:I can see it now by Jookey · · Score: 1

      pretty sure the navy is just adding a new tool to there shipboard machine shop.

  2. Won't somebody please think of the contractors! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

    This seems downright unamerican! If a branch of the armed forces develops the ability to do something internally, how can it be contracted out? Perhaps congress will oblige us with a variant on the farm bill; and ensure 'price stability' by paying the former producers of now 3d-printed parts to not produce them.

    1. Re:Won't somebody please think of the contractors! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Croydon is God's own country.

    2. Re:Won't somebody please think of the contractors! by stolidobserver · · Score: 1

      Well, aren't you just totally informed, you must have been in the service as I was. I was SATCOM, we constantly had dudes in and out in Italy. I was once responsible for carting one team around and they lost their cargo so I took them to the local BRICO and helped the install.... they still lost their contract ( a side note, everyone else called one of the the team members 'ass crack', fat dude with saggy pants always saying he had a job with the NSA waiting... ), just my luck that I can't be putting that on my resume.

    3. Re:Won't somebody please think of the contractors! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You wouldn't download a warship...would you?

    4. Re:Won't somebody please think of the contractors! by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Captain, we're sinking!

      Don't panic, sailor, just print us a new ship.

      Didn't something like that happen on an episode of Red Dwarf?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. DDDavy Jones' Locker by turkeydance · · Score: 0

    that's three D's

  4. This makes complete sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The more components that can be made on the ship for repairs, the less that needs to be stocked. This really applies for long-term deployments, as if they can maintain a small amount of resources to do small repairs, it means the fleet can stay out longer. That said, if the personnel get burned out, the 3d printers may be the first equipment to "need servicing."

    1. Re:This makes complete sense by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      On the plus side, unless WWIII is breaking out(in which case the personnel getting burned out is likely to be a trickier problem; but also one you'd encounter regardless of spare parts), you can probably swap out crew more easily than you can parts(especially the larger ones, or the more sensitive ones that you can't just put in checked baggage); unless the ship is in the midst of active hostility, in which case the crew would be pretty dumb to sabotage equipment that increases their odds of making it home alive.

      With humans, you have some uncertainty(accidents, unusual medical issues, the occasional psych freakout or disciplinary problem); but the approximate rate at which you need to rotate people to keep them from burning out is comparatively predictable. With spare parts, there are some you know you'll need; but an impractically bulky number of ones you might need; but can't say for sure about. Much easier to ferry out a fresh batch of crew every X months than it is to guess, sufficiently far in advance, what parts to put on the next supply boat.

    2. Re:This makes complete sense by Shoten · · Score: 1

      On the plus side, unless WWIII is breaking out(in which case the personnel getting burned out is likely to be a trickier problem; but also one you'd encounter regardless of spare parts), you can probably swap out crew more easily than you can parts(especially the larger ones, or the more sensitive ones that you can't just put in checked baggage); unless the ship is in the midst of active hostility, in which case the crew would be pretty dumb to sabotage equipment that increases their odds of making it home alive.

      With humans, you have some uncertainty(accidents, unusual medical issues, the occasional psych freakout or disciplinary problem); but the approximate rate at which you need to rotate people to keep them from burning out is comparatively predictable. With spare parts, there are some you know you'll need; but an impractically bulky number of ones you might need; but can't say for sure about. Much easier to ferry out a fresh batch of crew every X months than it is to guess, sufficiently far in advance, what parts to put on the next supply boat.

      You think that crew are the expendable element on a ship? Wow...where did you get your expertise in military operations...Jerry Bruckheimer movies?

      The military throws tremendous amounts of materiel and money at preservation of personnel, because personnel are always the choke point. It's always been that way, too...back in WW2, they could build fighters like nobody's business, but training pilots took far longer and cost much more. Expertise, experience, training, team acceptance...these are all hard-won things that cannot be rushed and for which no shortcuts have been found. Even without 3D printing, it takes a lot longer to produce a seaman or an ensign than it does to create a replacement part. (And I'm hoping nobody catches on to the phonetics of "how long it takes to produce a seaman in the navy")

      --

      For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
    3. Re:This makes complete sense by ihtoit · · Score: 1

      translation: the fab shop can be located on the carrier negating the need for yet another hulk in the fleet for the submarines to protect.

      This is about saving money in paying crews, maintaining ships and nerfing the group's speed to that of the slowest boat.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    4. Re:This makes complete sense by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      I didn't mean to imply that the crew were expendable; but to respond to the grandparent post's note that technology that enables very long deployments isn't going to stop the people from burning out after a while.

      My intended point was that, while people do react increasingly poorly to very long deployments, that is a comparatively predictable problem, which can be combated by a moving people in and out of active duty to control the length of active service; which is something that militaries have done for quite some time. If some fancy ultra-long-endurance technology allows you to send a ship out for X years, determining how you'll rotate crew in and out to keep each sailor within acceptable limits is going to be more complex than it is in lower endurance ships were the endurance of the crew is equal to or greater than that of the ship, so everyone leaves and comes back at the same time; but steadily rotating part of the manpower of a relatively large ship, base, etc. in order to compromise between cohesion and length of active service isn't a fundamentally novel problem.

    5. Re:This makes complete sense by SirSlud · · Score: 1

      In short, if your ship can stay out longer and longer, then you will have to figure out how to rotate the humans aboard.

      --
      "Old man yells at systemd"
    6. Re:This makes complete sense by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Ships have enormous crews for those moments when too many people is not enough. The rest of the time there are plenty of people and burnout is not supposed to happen.

    7. Re:This makes complete sense by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Yeah, you put it way more concisely than I managed to.

      I suppose you could also swap out an entire crew at a time; but I suspect that that plan wouldn't work as well in practice. You will need some alternative to just having the crew assembled for the duration of the operation; and then resting or replacing it when you return to port; whatever seems best.

    8. Re:This makes complete sense by tomhath · · Score: 1

      This really applies for long-term deployments

      Not really. Ships don't just go out to the middle of the ocean and drive around in circles. When deployed they spend most of their time in port. Even when out at sea it's rarely a problem getting small parts to a ship by helicopter; bigger parts usually require a visit to a shipyard anyway. Plus what usually breaks down is electronic.

  5. Simens has a controller and is partnered with adit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Simens with the nx (unigraphics) is working with eroupian and Japanese metal aditive manufacturing companies that have not only a 3d printing head but a machining head. Imagine 3d printing the equivalent to a casting and then machining the critical surfaces and holes. It's pfm. Pure fucking magic.

  6. Acronym by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Quality Metal Additive Manufacturing
    Quality M___AD___E!? No. It says Quality MAM; hold the boobie jokes.

  7. Tired topic by SageMusings · · Score: 1

    I would rather not see any stories featuring easy tripe buzz words for a while. This includes: Drones, 3D Printers, and Graphene.

    --
    -- Posted from my parent's basement
    1. Re:Tired topic by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well then you're going to absolutely love the next story. It's about 3D-printed graphene quadcopters...

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    2. Re:Tired topic by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Well then you're going to absolutely love the next story. It's about 3D-printed graphene quadcopters...

      And they're being developed by Elon Musk in partnership with Uber.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    3. Re:Tired topic by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Are you talking about the solar powered 3d printers?

  8. Haha! by Shoten · · Score: 1

    I can't wait until the first files show up on the Internet to make it possible to 3D-print your very own 12-inch naval artillery!

    On the other hand, though...after that day I will no longer be willing to visit either Texas or Arizona.

    --

    For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
    1. Re:Haha! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't wait until the first files show up on the Internet to make it possible to 3D-print your very own 12-inch naval artillery!

      You really think you're going to have a 3D printer big enough to print that?

      I mean, given a big enough lathe (or casting furnace), you can already make your own 12 inch naval artillery. But nobody except ship builders, navies and navy contractors have those sized machines.

      Plenty of folks DO have lathes big enough to build cannons and illegal caliber rifles, but that really hasn't been a problem, because the kind of person that has $100k invested in a lathe isn't the sort of person to try shelling their capitol for a laugh.

      An artillery is just a big strong pipe that can be closed at one end, with a means to ignite what you stuff in that end, and a means to raise the other end.

      Also consider plenty of folk get permits to make black powder cannons which could destroy buildings, cars, and so forth. And yet I haven't heard of a single incident in recent history of someone going wack-a-doo with a 60mm cannon.

  9. It's all fun and games by ihtoit · · Score: 1

    ...Until your 3-D printed weather deck delaminates.

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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  11. Structure & microstructure by Richard+Kirk · · Score: 2

    I don't think the article is suggesting aircraft carriers have a big fabber below desks that will print you out a new aircraft. I expect it will be used in the first instance to reduce inventory for all the spare bits and pieces, and it will be asked to make a new handle for the coffee jug. But I reckon this could go a long way...

    The big drop forges are used to form and work-harden material in one blow. If you have a press that is big enough to whack out a whole aircraft bulkhead in one go, then you end up with a thin, light component without any heat-affected zones from welds. That is pretty good way of making tough microstructures provided you can chose your atoms so they form the right sort of microstructures by themselves. You can, in theory have aluminium alloys with carbon fibres in them, but you cannot get them by conventional techniques. But you might be able to lay down sprayed metal and fibres and design your microstructure from scratch. It will probably be slow because you haven't got the massive parallelism of all the atoms doing the right thing for themselves, but it will get us into places that drop forging has never gone.

    The other thing we can do is to make complicated internal structures. Our bones have a lattice of tiny struts that are continuously broken and repaired, which is how they optimise their strength. People have made a similar structure for a car bumper. It took a day to print a bumper but it had millions of little struts that absorbed energy as the bumper hit something and crumpled, in a way that a bulk plastic product never could. I can imagine aircraft wings could be stiffer and yet fail in a controlled slow bending rather than buckling if they were made like this. One day we could even mimic the regeneration process of our bones.

    I suspect the actual story is nothing like as exciting as this. But it is a beginning.

    1. Re:Structure & microstructure by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      Agree, very promising technology with lots of small scale uses right now. This is the first time I've heard of printing ships and I like the idea of printing buildings on site using recycled building materials.

      Living bone awesome, they have their own independent neural network that can function without any help from the brain, (as does your gut). The neural network in your bones is responsible for the structural adaptations made in response to environmental stresses in individuals, it basically senses stresses in 3D and orchestrates bone building to compensate. It is light years ahead of our current materials science but not so much as to be totally implausible.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.