In Bristol, UK, the discourse among a 200-strong delegation is going as deep as submarine engineering and Greek Philosophy and as lofty as rocket engine manufacture and self-healing materials.
Yet a pointed remark from John Sneden, the Air Force Director of Propulsion at the US Air Force Life Cycle Management Centre reminds all in attendance of the reason they are in the room. “If I’m at war and it takes 6-9 months to deliver the part, how useless is that?”
Pretty useless those in attendance agree. That’s why they – the additive manufacturing operators and engineers, the business leaders and heads of department – are here. To figure out, as a collective, how best to assess additive manufacturing, how best to adopt the technology and then how best to deploy it.
The setting is the 2024 Additive Manufacturing for Aerospace, Defence and Space (AMADS) Conference, which has brought together an assortment of allied partners, suppliers and OEMs to discuss the challenges and opportunities of deploying additive manufacturing across the three fields.
At times, it feels like the entire room has the same problem with no solution in sight. The cohort is striving for perfection in a world whose imperfections are all too apparent – not least to the aerospace and defence delegates in the room. But that’s the standard they set.
Nobody here has the answers. At least not today. But there are tidbits and morsels, parts and systems, visions and strategies that give the room a buoyancy.
Here's what we learn.
The Ministry of Defence has a vision, but no formal strategy (yet)
“What is the Ministry of Defence doing with additive manufacturing at a top level? The US has a strategy, the Australians have a strategy. What about the MOD?”
This is a question Alexander Champion, Additive Manufacturing Project Manager at the Ministry of Defence (MOD), is all too used to having to field. He understands it, of course, because the strategies of the UK’s counterparts are easily accessible if you know how to use a search engine. The UK’s plan, however, has not been that easy to understand. Although, in fairness, that goes beyond defence and aerospace.
But, Champion revealed at AMADS last week, a plan does exist. More specifically, the MOD has a ‘vision paper’, which is considered to be a pre-requisite for a more defined strategy. This document has not yet been made public since it is still subject to further developments and adjustments but it represents a step in the right direction.
Champion comments: “Compared to where we were two years ago, we are far more mature, far more coherent.”
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Though no formal strategy is yet in place, the MOD and its Armed Forces divisions have been collaborating in recent years; sharing ideas and learnings as a result of the Project TAMPA initiative.
Project TAMPA is a 5 million GBP project made up of four ‘spirals’ that are focused on understanding how the MOD can benefit from AM through the development of a series of applications.
The development of these applications, which will likely increase in complexity with each spiral, is being done in the context of a series of working groups, such as the Digital Thread Working Group, the Certification Working Group, or the Inventory Management Working Group.
The Inventory Management Working Group, for example, has seen a bracket for the Mastiff armoured patrol vehicle additively manufactured as part of Spiral 1. This bracket engages the door when the door is opened and regularly breaks in the field. Typically, plasma cutting, two rounds of machining and welding processes are used to manufacture this component to the correct accuracy, but the part can be made in a single piece with AM. Its weight can also be reduced by 50% and it can be delivered in 2 weeks compared to 11 with traditional techniques.
Because the part is breaking down so much, it is considered a suitable component to inform Project Tampa’s Inventory Management Working Group, helping the MOD and its suppliers to identify the pain points in the supply chain and making sure ‘there is no excuse for additive manufacturing not to be used in defence.’
Digital inventories will be key – and NATO might have the answer
The MOD aren’t the only ones to have identified AM’s potential to improve the multi-faceted supply chains of the defence industry.
Dan Anders-Brown, who spent 30 years in the British Army – introducing AM into the organisation with Champion – before joining QinetiQ, suggests that the biggest problem with AM in the defence space is the lack of digitised inventory.
“This is true of MOD, it’s true of defence, it’s also true of some of our partners operating in and around Ukraine,” Anders-Brown notes. “A lot of printers have gone out to Ukraine and I think that’s laudable and that gives them another tool in their toolbox, but without the digital inventory to support that, it’s very difficult for them to turn that into something that can get a piece of kit back on the road.”
Anders-Brown goes on to state that there are more than a million spare parts in the UK defence inventory and ‘the vast majority of them don’t have any kind of digital record.’ Of those that do have a digital record, a lot of them aren’t then designed for additive manufacturing. So, if the industry wants to adopt AM technology to produce parts at the point of need, they’re going to need to develop the digital infrastructure to facilitate it.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) thinks it may have a solution. RAPiD-e is a digital repository concept being developed to allow NATO nations to publish, share, request and consume digital technical data packages associated with AM parts. The thought is this platform will allow those nations and departments experienced in AM can help to get their allies, partners and suppliers up to speed sooner.
This platform will allow nations to create multiple private repositories and shared libraries, meaning it can be used to store AM design files exclusive to its own nation, as well as parts that it is willing to share with allies. Parts found in shared libraries can be requested by nations, with the IP owner able to accept or deny the request. If choosing to accept, the requestor will have access to the files associated with the published part, but the IP owner could ask for fees, royalties or set conditions.
In June 2023, a NATO interoperability exercise was carried out with 40 participating countries, with a successful testing of RAPiD-e carried out between the UK and Denmark. February and March of this year have seen a joint multi-nation and multi-domain exercise alongside the UK and US Armies, with ‘exhaustive tests’ of RAPiD-e being carried out to generate feedback. In June 2024, the testing will reach its next phase. Here, additional nations and industry partners will evaluate different digital data packages for parts specification and qualification, while IP testing, tentative integrations and parts certification experiments will also be carried out.
NATO has submitted for full accreditation of RAPiD-e to the NATO Security Office and hopes to have approval for production granted this year.
Read more: “AM is now at the business end of the hype curve.” – Through the doors at GKN Aerospace
Cost remains a barrier at the point of adoption
Despite the ongoing work of many suppliers and OEMs in the room, and despite the relatively big budgets defence organisations have available to them, many delegates were still raising procurement as a big hurdle.
One of the first to reference the barrier of cost is GKN Aerospace Principal Research Engineer Bradley Hughes, who talks of a ‘pathfinder paradox.’ Manufacturers are often told to identify the ‘low-hanging fruit’ when integrating additive manufacturing into their production processes, and for industries like defence, that means parts of low criticality. But Hughes points out that AM can’t always compete with traditional processes on cost when it comes to the production of those parts, meaning it’s a challenge from the get-go to sell the idea of purchasing a printer to decision-makers.
“How can we win in the short term to unlock AM in the long run?” Hughes asks.
The answer may be to find low-criticality parts that can beat the traditional processes on other fronts if not cost. Hughes presented a fan case mount ring which was produced with DED technology, exhibiting a 90% reduction in waste compared to forging and a 35% reduction in Co2.
Of course, that won’t necessarily satisfy a company’s balance sheet, so cost will always remain a factor. Hughes therefore stresses the importance of educating the procurement department – “Take a long-term view because aerospace is a long-term play.” – and he isn’t the last to do so.
The theme comes up again in a Day 1 workshop hosted by Len Pennett, Co-Chair of the Inventory Working Group at the MOD, who notes the importance of procurement personnel considering ‘greater good factors’, but also getting them involved earlier in the discussions around additive, and potentially training them in AM too.
Next-generation vehicles open the door for AM
In Spiral 1 of Project Tampa, the majority of the parts being additively engineered by the MOD and its suppliers are mounting brackets, brake step warriors and wheel hub assemblies – the kinds of things you’d expect to find on a vehicle.
While many of the challenges that the aerospace and defence industries are confronted with are the same that the automotive world and the consumer goods space face, the design, certification and life-span of vehicles are specific to the aero and defence fields.
On the one hand, Fernando Larategui, Associate Technical Fellow in ALM at ITP Aero, notes how new aerospace programmes will allow suppliers to exploit design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) principles, but on the other, RBSL Lead Technologist Julian Wright points out how the long lifespan of vehicles, especially armoured ones, actually restricts their design.
In his presentation, Anders-Brown describes tanks as over-engineered, suggesting that the components and systems underneath the armour are engineered to be stronger and weightier than they need to be ‘in case they’re shot at.’
“They’re not going to get shot at, they’re underneath the armour,” says Anders-Brown admittedly tritely. “So why don’t we start to think about that 25-50% [of weight] that is under the armour being lightweighted.”
Addressing this with additive manufacturing and topology optimisation, Anders-Brown says, could result in significant reductions in mean value before failure, fuel consumption and range, as well as allowing the armed forces to carry more weapons per vehicle – something the MOD, for example, likes to do when possible.
These vehicles are, of course, designed to be in service for decades, but when next-generation programmes do come about, it is likely organisations like the MOD will want to lean on AM to design and manufacture them.
It is an incentive, then, for the challenges the aerospace and defence industries are facing to be addressed. As is being detailed across a range of presentations and conversations, all the major players have application examples, but they also have pain points.
Andrew Munday, Engineering and Technology Director of Mission Systems at Babcock, is another to spell out the challenges while indicating the opportunities for AM. Submarines, he puts to his fellow delegates, are the most complex things that humans know how to make, and as a submarine enterprise, Munday says Babcock needs to reduce build times by a third and cost by a half.
With that in mind, the company has made some early inroads into additive, participating in both spirals 1 and 2 of Project TAMPA and identifying a series of low-criticality parts to get started. These components include a hinge arm made with wire arc additive manufacturing and a buffer cylinder 3D printed with a laser powder bed fusion process.
The hinge arm component is an application that Babcock had previously manufactured with forging but has been able to reduce the lead time by 50% and the cost by 30% by transferring to wire arc additive manufacturing.
“Once you start to add those together, we’re talking about quite significant savings,” Munday says. “And these are not savings that we can ignore as a submarine enterprise because we need this technology, and we need this change to be able to achieve the timescales we’re talking about in the future.”
It stands to reason, then, that as defence organisations begin to plan for next-generation vehicles, additive manufacturing will be looked to reduce weight and increase functionality.
An RBSL review of its parts inventory in 2017 revealed that 38% of its vehicle parts could be suitable for AM - what Dr. Marcus Potter, Head of Mobility, describes as a 'significant opportunity.' And that opportunity extends beyond the temporary repair parts the UK Army are working on and the fuel system rings BAE Systems is developing to the turbine exhaust case vanes ITP Aero is developing for the TP400 engine on Airbus' A400M Atlas military transport aircraft.
Read more: Honeywell & Boeing provide an update on the AM Forward initiative
The UK is playing catch up to the US
“It doesn't matter what the part is, what it goes on, everything additive is considered high risk.”
This is the current cultural landscape inside the US Department of Defense, as told to the delegates by Beth Dittmer, Propulsion Integration Division Chief at the US Air Force Life Cycle Management Centre. “We can’t tolerate any failures,” she says, before adding: “That creates a lot of scepticism. A lot of what’s impeding us right now is culture-based.”
This is the perspective from the US, where the Government has, in recent years, launched the AM Forward initiative, and where its various Armed Forces divisions have awarded a series of contracts of significant value to additive manufacturing OEMs.
Over in the UK, the MOD is all too aware that it doesn’t have a formalised plan, and even on the civil side, the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) is still in the process of developing its AM strategy (to be released later this year). The ATI has been granted 975 million GBP in funding by the UK Government from 2026 through to 2030 and believes AM will be a key enabler in terms of supply chain resilience. It has thus commissioned the MTC to help it develop its AM strategy.
When it comes to the scale of applying AM in the UK, Ruaridh Mitchinson of the MTC tells the delegates how only ten AM civil aircraft parts are flying with UK-based organisations, even though ATI’s support has enabled nearly 114 million GBP in funding for AM projects.
The question being asked is, “Why aren’t there more UK AM parts flying?”
Over in the US, Boeing’s Vice President of AM Melissa Ormer prefers her bosses to ask, “How many parts am I saving with AM?”
At Boeing, an aerospace giant that is using AM technology to develop parts for civil and military vehicles, there are 140,000 additively manufactured parts flying on its vehicles alone. The number of parts reduced, therefore, we can assume is so much more.
In one single Wideband Global SATCOM, the company transformed the design of the small satellite to eliminate around 40,000 parts, saving 4m USD per aircraft, incorporating thin walls to reduce the weight, and eliminating a bunch of inventory and logistics in the meantime. Orme also presented applications such as a Boeing 787 aft galley support bracket which consumed 39% less energy than its conventionally machined counterpart and another bracket component which reduced CO2 reduction by 19% just by removing 0.25 pounds from the part.
Boeing, then, is proving to the DoD, ATI, the MOD, and the rest of the field what can be done with additive manufacturing.
Nobody in the AM space likes to hear that the DoD would still consider AM to be risky no matter what it’s used to produce or where it is installed, but that feedback is necessary to understand what must be done to get more additively manufactured parts on planes, cars, tanks, and subs.
What was marketed as a conference has sometimes turned into a focus group, with engineers and business leaders outlining the challenges they have to invest in, incorporate, and implement the technology. As Mitchinson details in his presentation, the cost of using AM is high, there’s a lack of qualification and certification experience, it’s often a struggle to get senior stakeholder buy-in, the supply chain needs reinforcement, and the community lacks alignment in addressing priorities that are essential for meeting future industrial requirements.
The answers to those problems have so far not been so easy to come by, and AM users are now looking outward to see how they might obtain the solutions.
Most in the room are betting the farm on collaboration. Collaboration that will set the standards and develop the certifications, collaboration that will educate its engineers and its procurement department too, and collaboration that will prioritise, strategise and, in time, optimise with AM.
From the AMADS Conference last week, they can carry with them this reminder from Champion: “Lots of lessons you can learn using a million-pound metal printer, you can learn using a 200-pound hobbyist printer. Start small, be ambitious, and grow fast. [We need to also] understand the pain of what we’re trying to solve. If there is no pain, maybe additive isn’t the right thing.”
