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."

Comments

I can see it now

[Ol Olsoc]

"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!"

Re:I can see it now

[Ol Olsoc]

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

Re:I can see it now

[TheGavster]

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.

Re:I can see it now

[TapeCutter]

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.

Re:I can see it now

[oobayly]

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.

Re:Tired topic

[ArcadeMan]

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

Structure & microstructure

[Richard Kirk]

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.