DEFENSE R&D OUTLOOK
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TRANSFORMING MILITARY LOGISTICS By Craig Collins
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n November 2016, when the Department of Defense (DOD) released its first Additive Manufacturing Roadmap, the document began with a sentence that has proven to be something of an understatement: “Additive manufacturing (AM), which includes the commonly used term ‘3D printing,’ is a rapidly growing and changing discipline.” It’s been less than three years since then. While much of the world continues to think of AM technology as a convenient way to make sturdy plastic objects from 3D printers, military personnel at all levels have been pushing its limits far beyond what most imagined possible. Within that interval, these are just a few of the solutions produced by the military and its partners: • At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Disruptive Technologies Laboratory of the Naval Surface Warfare Center produced the military’s first 3D-printed submarine hull, a 30-foot submersible hull inspired by the SEAL Delivery Vehicle. Compared to a traditional SEAL submarine hull, which costs up to $800,000 and takes three to five months to manufacture, the six carbon-fiber sections of the new prototype were built in four weeks and assembled at a cost of $60,000. • At the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, at the facility now known as the Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Armaments Center, the Army unveiled a grenade launcher, the Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance (RAMBO), a modified version of the older M203 launcher. RAMBO consists of 50 separate parts, each of which, except for the springs and fasteners, was built through an additive manufacturing process. The materials used for these parts include plastic, aluminum, and 4340 alloy steel. • Maintainers at Hill Air Force Base in Utah installed a 3D-printed bracket, made of titanium, on an operational F-22 Raptor. The corrosion-resistant part was used to replace an aluminum bracket in the kick panel of the aircraft cockpit. It was the Air Force’s first operational use of a metallic 3D-printed part on
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an F-22, and happened just months after the service’s Rapid Sustainment Office installed 17 printed parts, including both polymer and metal components, on a C-5 Super Galaxy aircraft. • With the use of a gantry-mounted concrete printer jointly developed by the Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), NASA, and Caterpillar, Marines, soldiers, and Navy Seabees built a 500-square-foot hardened living space – a barracks – in just 40 hours at ERDC’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, Illinois. The printer is a joint Marines/Army initiative known as Automated Construction of Expeditionary Structures, or ACES. Months later, the 1st Marine Logistics group, with the help of the Marine Corps Systems Command, the Army Corps of Engineers, and Navy Seabees, used the ACES printer to build a functional concrete footbridge in 14 hours, the first 3D-printed bridge in the western hemisphere, at Camp Pendleton, California. • At the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a research team supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research used additive manufacturing to produce soft, pliable nanostructures that can be manipulated when magnetized. The 3D-printed nanobots, which can be made to roll, crawl, jump, and grab, may someday be used as magnetically controlled biomedical devices. Few technologies are as vigorously hyped throughout the military as additive manufacturing, for good reason: The ability to produce components on demand, at the point of need, will transform logistics, reduce material waste, and enable customization, all at a fraction of the costs and times involved in the manufacturing process that traditionally feeds military resupply and acquisitions. AM is already being viewed as a possible alternative means of tackling problems unsolved by current budget levels: In the spring of 2019, the Navy’s Information Warfare Research Project Consortium issued a solicitation asking industry to use AM and innovative technologies to develop
