WASHINGTON — The expansion of additive manufacturing is a “game changer” for the military — one which can facilitate all the things from rapid repairs to aircraft after bird strikes to accelerating the event of hypersonic weapons, a top Defense Department official said Wednesday.
Keith DeVries, deputy director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Manufacturing Technology Program, said in a Defense News webcast Wednesday that additive manufacturing has made “tremendous leaps” in the previous couple of years and opened up novel possibilities for creating latest weapons and components.
Additive manufacturing has particularly turn out to be useful when designing latest systems, DeVries said, allowing programs to iterate throughout the rapid prototyping process far more quickly than in traditional manufacturing processes.
It has also been used to create “one-off” spare parts to repair aircraft or other systems that may otherwise need to wait long periods for a alternative component to work its way through a slow supply chain, he said.
“We’ve even seen bird strikes repaired on aircraft overnight, or in a couple of days, through additive manufacturing,” DeVries added.
3D printers may also quickly create latest tools, which generally take an extended time to reach after they are made in traditional ways, he said.
And DeVries said the size of objects that will be 3D printed can also be increasing, to the purpose where entire structures comparable to houses will be built that way.
The Defense Department has taken notice of those advancements, he said, and is searching for ways to use them.
“Within the defense side … having the flexibility to print a runway or a hangar or something literally overnight will be amazing,” DeVries said.
Additive manufacturing has advanced since its early days, when it made objects from more fragile polymers to materials with higher tensile strength. Today, DeVries said, these manufacturing techniques create objects from high-entropy metals which are particularly strong and arise to wear and tear, using lasers to melt metals that may withstand high temperatures and allowing more complex shapes to be crafted.
“Those advancements have been fundamental unto themselves,” DeVries said. “Now, it appears like we’re turning a corner and we’re trying to search out what the sweet spot is for a way big of a construct volume is acceptable for us to use that technology.”
And hypersonic weapons are a distinguished example of a program where additive manufacturing will be useful.
Scramjet propulsion systems which are central to some hypersonics, for instance, require complex chambers that will be difficult to make, DeVries said. But 3D printing these components is allowing hypersonic weapons manufacturers “some incredible capabilities,” he said.
Additive manufacturing would allow scramjet components to be constituted of high-temperature metals in a way that eliminates the necessity to have complex welds or brazing joints, DeVries said. Those joints have to be tested to make sure they’re sound, he said, but a component made via additive manufacturing that doesn’t have those joints won’t need such testing.
“Having the ability to incorporate additive manufacturing is enabling us to fabricate complexity that has not been able under the subtractive, traditional manufacturing methods,” DeVries said. He noted hypersonic development remains to be within the rapid prototyping phase.
But DeVries said traditional manufacturing techniques comparable to casting and forging still have a spot, and warned the DoD and manufacturers should only seek to exchange those techniques with additive manufacturing “in a really intentional and albeit limited way.”
“We wish to treat [additive manufacturing] as a tool within the toolkit, and we wish to use it exactly where it’s needed, and where it adds essentially the most value,” DeVries said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.