www.onr .navy.mil/innovate Vol. 10 | Spring 2013 16

the fUtURe Of maNUfa ctURiNg is as simple as aDDitiON aND a little sUBtRactiON

Khershed P. Cooper, Ph.D., FASM

Metallurgist, Materials Science & Technology , Naval Research Laboratory Program Oﬃcer, ONR Manufacturing Science Program, ManTech

Imagine being able to build any object of any shape, of any complexity, of any material, at any me, anywhere. Imagine being able to print whatever you can think or whatever you can draw. Imagine being able to design a part at one locaon and have it produced at another. Imagine being able to scan a broken part and have its replacement made at the push of a buon. The rst glimpses of this future of manufacturing are evident today in part because of early investments by the Oce of Naval Research (ONR). That is the excitement of Addive Manufacturing. Addive Manufacturing (AM) is the ability to create a solid object from a digital model. Starng with a computer- aided design (CAD) le, a machine builds its physical replica by incremental addion or fusing of small volumes (voxels) of material. The CAD model is decomposed into slices, opmal tool paths to form each slice are determined, and a machine is instructed to create and stack the slices while building the 3D object.

Figure 1

illustrates the AM concept. AM opens up the window for making objects never before possible. Thanks to AM, objects can be built of mulple materials and have complex internal and external geometries. If you take a look at

Figure 2

, you’ll see a few examples of objects constructed by AM: components with conformal cooling channels (2a), components with moving parts (2b), customized parts (2c), and any imagined decorave artwork (2d). Other materials and structures possible are metamaterials (e.g. , auxec, cloaking), and variable-porosity structures (e.g. , bone- or wood-type). These complex shapes and composite structures cannot be produced by tradional means such as machining, casng, or powder consolidaon. Convenonal processes require xturing, tooling, and mostly produce simple geometries. The benets of AM to the Navy are plenty. The Navy and DoD are dealing with aging systems. Legacy systems are increasing in number and facing obsolescence. If a part breaks, we are faced with non-existent suppliers, unreliable foreign sources, and unavailable drawings. In such a scenario, it is possible to

reverse engineer

the damaged part and have