The 3D Opportunity: Additive Manufacturing in Defense Forum — Recap
In case you missed the fantastic lineup of speakers at the Additive Manufacturing (AM) Defense Forum hosted by Deloitte yesterday (2/29), I wanted to post this recap to make sure we are all on the same page going forward. One thing is for certain and it’s that Deloitte has taken the pole position as a trust advisor and partner to America Makes on their upcoming Department of Defense (DoD) roadmapping effort. This is sure to serve as a guide for all coordinated AM implementation efforts in the future, so stay tuned.
** Any omissions or errors in these notes are mine alone. The credit for the good stuff goes to the great speakers at the event.**
General Charles F. Wald (USAF, Ret.) kicked off the morning with insights on the United States’ effort to create alternative’s to the the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines that are commonly used to power heavy lifts that launch sensitive satellites into space. He highlighted AM’s role as a key tool in our ability to grow this capability internally and drastically reduce the development lead-time in doing so. He also introduced the keynote speaker.
The keynote and well known Navy Champion of AM, Vice Adm. Philip Cullom, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Readiness and Logistics (OPNAV N4), shared his vision for a self-sustaining ship, powered by fusion reactors and maintained with additively manufactured parts. He explained the need for acquisition reform to breakaway from the bureaucratic processes he calls the borg and outlined that this process is the reason many small and innovative companies choose not to do work with the DoD. He cautioned the audience that we collectively need to come to terms with how to manage the cyber security aspect of the all important digital thread, which will serve as a backbone for additive manufacturing, and discussed the importance of the global collaboration that is taking place between the U.S. and its allies. He concluded that he doesn’t necessarily envision having a 3D printer on every ship, rather a distributed logistics model with micro-factories on larger ships and depots close to the point of need that can provide on-demand parts to sustain the warfighter.
Matt Widmer, Deloitte Federal Advisory Services Principal, followed the Admiral with a strong and well articulated presentation on the intellectual property considerations for advancing the AM business model. He highlighted IP trends in industries such as movies and music to demonstrate the natural progression of disruptive technologies. He explained that these technologies often go through an initial emergence (Napster) followed by significant litigation that is required to allow stakeholders to move forward, and the eventual creation of a method to capitalize on the new technology (iTunes). He was relatively certain that we will see instances of litigation, regardless of how much effort goes into preparing for the technology and highlighted that everyone’s business model is going to change.
Jim Joyce, Additive Manufacturing and Supply Chain Manufacturing Specialist for Deloitte, discussed the importance of creating an all-encompassing digital thread. He explained that many companies are working on this (Dassault Systems, Autodesk, etc.), but most are only carving out only a small piece of the supply chain and not taking a systematic holistic approach. The Digital Thread for Additive Manufacturing (DTAM) is the primary piece of the puzzle holding back our ability to broadly benefit from AM technology. Joyce outlined that we cannot have distributed manufacturing without the digital thread and highlighted the need for a focus on blockchain and other linking solutions that will enable it. He stressed the importance of two-way information flow between the material producers and machine operators to continue cultivating a stronger foundation of data to build upon.
Ian Wing, Senior Consultant at Deloitte introduced the technical talks of the day by outlining the four key challenges of AM including: Intellectual Property, Information Management, Quality Assurance and Workforce Development.
**It is about to get very technical, so I am switching to bullet point format for ease of reading.**
Ade Makinde, Principle Engineer GE Global Research, gave a talk on using Physics-Based Tools for Rapid Qualification of Parts. Here are some of the points made in his presentation:
- Topology optimization — going from the output of this digital optimization to the production of a real part is a serious challenge that we have yet to overcome.
- Using physics based models to determine what is needed to have a viable part at the end will improve the process.
- Leveraging model based engineering to determine what you can build and what you can’t — there are still some restrictions on the kinds of things you can build with AM. Designing the support structure is crucial because it can be very challenging to remove after the print is completed.
- Need to have the confidence that we will be able to build a part with repeatable variability and right now that is not the case.
- Took several years to get the Leap fuel injection nozzle to where it is now. GE does not want it to take as long next time and his team is working to ensure that it doesn’t.
- GE is also working with America Makes to develop an open-source AM machine that should significantly improve in-process monitoring, variable control and post qualification.
- It takes about 10 years to develop a new material and there are a significant number of hurdles that the material has to overcome. This is why GE is using known alloys and not developing them from scratch. There is not one single company that can create its own database for the materials, as it requires a deeper knowledge of the way things form. The only way to achieve this is through a collective effort.
Wayne King, Director, Accelerated Certification of Additively Manufactured Metals Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, provided a technical talk on simulation modeling of the metal powder bed fusion additive manufacturing process. My notes do not do his slides and videos justice, but here are some of the points he made in his presentation:
- The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) made up of the National Labs has the largest concerted effort focused on Additive Manufacturing with over 180 engineers.
- 10 years from now every AM machine will have intelligence feed-forward, in situ process monitoring. This means that we will see a significant rise in confidence for additively manufactured parts.
- He explained that they are coming up with new ways to address the challenges associated with overhangs in the AM process by turning down the laser power almost 75% to account for the first layer in overhang and after the first two layers the laser is returned to full strength. This manipulation of laser strength gives them much more control over the process.
- The sparks and spatter pattern created by the laser hitting the unsintered powder is one of the most important things to predict in the AM process and his team is using code to determine these things in a computationally intensive manner. He explained that we are just now beginning to understand how the laser interacts with the powder bed and must drive a greater understanding of how the laser interacts with the molten metal in the melt pool to determine energy absorption.
- In the laser sintering process there is something knows as recoil pressure where the laser actually forces the liquid metal out of the way and into the substrate. The laser moving over the powder creates a virtual bow wave in front of the beam observed at 250k frames per second and behind creates a Bernoulli Effect which causes the laser to shoot powder out the back of its path. These sparks and “snowballs” land in the powder bed and contaminate the unsintered powder. We must gain greater understanding of how to manipulate the lasers to control the process. Here is a paper he wrote on this topic in 2015 for a better explanation, specifically on page 19.
Paul Boulware, Applications Engineer at EWI (which I might note has a new $30M AM facility in Buffalo, NY) provided a technical talk on in-process sensing for laser powder bed fusion and direct energy deposition. Here are some of the points he made in his presentation:
- He began with a discussion of the value and need for in-process sensing by explaining that traditional manufacturing processes are broken into steps that all have QA processes built in. AM takes those process and aggregates them making it significantly harder to ensure you have produced a quality part at the end.
- Wasting equipment time is a huge pain point that in-process sensing will help alleviate so users can identify an issue that happens on layer 5 of a 1000-layer build and be more responsive to correct the problem during the build.
- The content in the laser plume holds a lot of information about the issues you could potentially have with the finished part. His team is using light, acoustics and temperature (among other things) to monitor melt pools, identify problem particles in the AM build process. While each of these tests has their limitations, together they provide users a significant amount of control and visibility of the build process.
- In-process sensing is necessary, but big data is a huge challenge that must be overcome as well. There is a lack of computing power and processing speed that will need to improve before users can have real-time measurements that can be applied to controls during the print process. In this situation it is a matter of how fast the machine can take and process data to feedback to a controller and catch problems before it is too late in the build.
Rob Gorham, Director of Operations at America Makes outlined their growing public-private partnerships (160+), 3D printing projects and roadmapping efforts through partnership with Deloitte. He explained that America Makes does not do organic research in-house, rather they provide a significant funding matches to support the research efforts of their industry partners. He explained that they partnered with Deloitte to execute the creation of a DoD AM roadmap.
Military panel facilitated by Mark LaViolette, Specialist Leader at Deloitte, consisting of: Greg Kilchenstein, Office of the Secretary of Defense; Captain Frank Futcher, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; Lieutenant Colonel Howard Marotto, USMC; Tony Delgado, Defense Logistics Agency; Scott Seitz, US Army, Logistics Innovation Agency; and Colonel Patrick Kumashiro, US Air Force. The following points are not attributed to any specific member, but highlight the overall discussion of the panel.
- The defense budget consists of at least $75 Billion worth of maintenance, of which 50% is spent on parts. This is a significant portion of the budget that AM can help address.
- We have additive capabilities in every depot across the department of defense and the collective group sees AM being used for repair of broken parts, capitalizing on the depot level repair (DLR) program, which has been a highly effective cost saving tool. Maintenance is at the heart of the supply chain and everything is driven by it.
- They envision a feedback loop where engineers work on a ship or plane can interact with the creators of a specific component to support repairs, redesign and continuous improvement.
- Resources and leadership were highlighted as the two things that were needed the most to push AM forward in the DoD.
- A lot of the information is not readily available because it is very challenging to get the IP for individual parts and systems. They mentioned that there is nothing compelling defense contractors to use additive even when it is a better process and suggest improving acquisition evaluation criteria to include the number of 3D printed parts as a significant component in determining the competitiveness of a proposal.
The last presentation of the day was a workforce development panel, facilitated by Kelly Marchese, Supply Chain Strategy Leader at Deloitte, and consisted of Leanne Gluck, Deputy Director, Workforce and Educational Outreach at America Makes; John Forsynthe, Director at Deloitte; and ; Colonel Patrick Kumashiro, US Air Force. Unfortunately, I was unable to stick around for this, but will say their focus was on building a workforce that is ready to handle the complex challenges associated with the incorporation of AM. There are efforts underway in the Navy to develop training programs that support a broader understanding of AM technology across the workforce. Most notably the FabLab project is being used to give Sailors a hands-on experience with the technology.
In all, the event was a huge success. The collaboration it fosters across agencies and services will have a lasting positive impact on AM implementation efforts, allowing us to leverage ongoing projects, reduce redundant spending and drive AM technology forward.
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