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