TCT
Earlier this year, Xerox announced the installation of an ElemX liquid metal 3D printing system on a U.S. naval vessel. It followed the deployment of a machine at the Naval Postgraduate School in California back in 2021 and served to represent the increasing play for metal 3D printing in the military sector.
In the latest of our Innovators on Innovators series, Tali Rosman, the Elem Additive General Manager at Xerox, sat down with Mike Pecota, a Contract Support subject matter expert for the Department of Defence, where he specialises in additive manufacturing (AM) to discuss additive manufacturing in the military.
Across an hour of conversation, the pair discussed the opportunities for digital inventories in defence sectors, what considerations have to be made when implementing AM in military organisations, and the need for baseline quality standards in 3D printing.
When discussing how new military users of 3D printing should go about applying the technology, Pecota explains that it can often be difficult to generate the funding when targeting the low hanging fruit:
"When you're talking in this environment, looking for a resource sponsor who's going to fund this large process so that we can have engineers even evaluating those parts and make sure they're doing the low critical parts, it's hard. It's really difficult to advocate and say, 'hey, if you spend millions of dollars for the next couple of years supporting these printers, we're going to make super low critical things that nobody cared about anyway, but we're gonna do it really well.' Resource sponsors, they want those big wins, they want to advocate and say, 'yes, we save this much money, we had a return on investment, we got these aircraft or equipment up, we solve these problems,' it's hard when you're focusing on lower criticality items and saying 'this is where we start, we're going to get there. But we have to do this many years of work, we need this much money to get there.' It's difficult."
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