Project Brief: Additive Manufacturing Production (AMPro) Project

CCAM is a founding member of the newly formed Additive Manufacturing Production (AMPro) consortium led by Austal Advanced Technologies – the Charlottesville, VA based research arm of AUSTAL USA.  The core team also includes Phillips Corporation, The Spectrum Group, Industrial Inspection & Analysis, FasTech, Mitutoyo, Master Gauge and Tool Co., and the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, which hosts the Navy’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence on their campus in Danville, VA.

The AMPro project was launched by the Naval Sea System Command to address critical supply chain issues for the US Navy. The goal is to increase U.S. manufacturing capacity, particularly for hard-to-source parts, such as castings, forgings and fittings.  AMPro (Figure 1) aims to create Additive Manufacturing (AM) serial production capability in the naval shipbuilding and repair supply chain through the adoption of AM in both existing manufacturing companies and through new business creation.

Figure 1: Digital thread for the creation and use of prescriptive technical data packages (TDP) for additively manufactured parts to supplement the submarine industrial base supply chain.

High speed, efficient part qualification using the requirements set forth by the US Navy’s technical community is the immediate goal along with the formation of a distributed manufacturing network for implementation. CCAM is leading both the Digital Thread Strategy & Implementation and Advanced Material Process & Qualification Methods thrusts for this program. This work will utilize CCAM’s expertise in: i) developing and implementing process intelligence tools – such as in-situ sensors, process models and data analytics techniques – to dynamic manufacturing processes (Figure 2), ii) efficiently collecting data across a sequence of manufacturing steps, and iii) correlating the analyzed data to quality measurements to accelerate the part qualification process.

Figure 2: Process intelligence tools for potential use in accelerating part qualification. Shown: a) Data processing / compression technique of infrared camera images from laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) AM build developed at CCAM to create a measured thermal history of an AM part during manufacturing and b) High speed thermal simulation of LBPF build developed at Virginia Tech (Prahalada Rao) for the same part geometry (CCAM-VT collaboration).

Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro (center), views demonstration by the CCAM team at an opening event of the Additive Manufacturing Center for Excellence in Danville, Virginia: (L-R) Kyle Snyder, Research Engineer, John Sions, Research Engineer, John Milton-Benoit, President & CEO, and Yuri Plotnikov, Senior Research Engineer