SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Additive manufacturing (AM) offers a potential “game-changer” for low-cost, fast turn-around fabrication of Navy components. Combined with methods such as reverse engineering metrology, AM can produce low batch on-demand quantities, which is ideal in the case of repair/replace Navy components that were damaged in the field or inserting a new design for lightweighting or performance enhancements. Wide-spread implementation of AM structures has been limited, however, mainly due to its lower maturity compared to conventional materials (metals, composites, plastics). There exists no single software application that implements the Navy’s qualification procedure. However, each exists separately, making it difficult to connect them together to get a clear picture of the risk of using the given AM process versus the original method. Consequently, it is very difficult to qualify any AM parts for naval use and limits the Navy’s ability to take advantage of this growing field of manufacturing. This proposal will build a tool that will walk users through a series of simulations that compare an AM part’s performance to its legacy variant, and determine how much risk is associated with AM replacement. The proposed tool will consist of three major modules. The first module, part performance M&S, will consist of a battery of tests geared towards the Navy’s qualification process, along with a database of materials, typically in base/AM pairs. The second module will perform optimization to improve the performance of the AM part given its design environment. The third module, risk assessment, will bring together multiple parallel runs of the part performance M&S module and information from a database about a given AM process and material. The risk assessment system will consider the AM part variant for a series of manufacturability checks, compare the simulation and database data against a set of risk metrics, and reduce these datapoints to a single number by weighting them and summing them together to represent the overall risk associated with switching to the AM part.
