Military Weapons and Parts

But the military has singular needs and life and death incentives to optimize performance. These needs run across all the services and the objectives they’re tasked to accomplish. Additive fabrication is being used or considered for a wide range of requirements, from the prosaic to the revolutionary, many of them quite imaginative.

For example, it’s not too obvious that it would be possible to customize warheads with features designed for specific missions. According to a patent granted to Lockheed Martin Corp., the method yields structures with singular as well as combined unique features, such as tailored fragmentation patterns, to provide what is described as “special effects.”

    

One applications that might be considered on the mundane side might be the use of the technology to make the wheels for tracked vehicles such as tanks. Additive fabrication allows producing complex hollow features that optimize weight and inertia. An example at the other end of the spectrum might be embedding sensors and electronic systems to provide remote monitoring of vehicle component condition and engine health.

As might be expected, additive technologies which produce more robust parts are most frequently used in military applications. Of particular interest are the laser powder forming and laser sintering families of technologies. Another method that is of very great interest is Ultrasonic Consolidation™ from Solidica, Inc. This laminated object manufacturing (LOM)-based method is being put to use in the embedded sensor application mentioned above, as well as in making armor from composites and in field-repair of titanium and other types of parts.

Repair and even limited series production in the field are becoming increasingly important. The military services have logistical supply and legacy equipment problems that dwarf any of those in the private sector. The Mobile Parts Hospital provides an example of how to address these problems on the battlefield. As presently deployed in Iraq, it uses three dimensional scanning and CNC equipment to make replacement parts right at the point of action. The entire system is housed in standard sized shipping containers. The MPH compensates for the fact that a lot of the military’s equipment is as much as 40 years old or may have come from manufacturers that are no longer in business. Future versions of the MPH are being evaluated that will use LENS® technology from Optomec to make fully-dense parts. Civilian versions might someday be used to make parts for such remotely-located machinery applications as oil rigs and mines.