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[charlie T colton]

Ensuring a Safe Technological Revolution

Ensuring a Safe Technological Revolution - November-December 2016

An excerpt:

Accelerating AM for Defense

How do we leverage the huge AM investments by commercial industry, while ensuring that AM can safely be used for carrier aviation and on our nuclear submarines? If we want AM to mature for defense applications, and if we ever want to use it in the future, we need to start now.

Every platform or system in the naval inventory includes parts that are hard to get. These parts are difficult to produce and are made with materials that require long lead times. They have limited supply bases and suboptimal designs; the DoD has hundreds of thousands of “problem children” parts. The ability to produce a subset of these parts through AM will dramatically increase readiness and reduce costs. And—if we commit to making them through AM—we can mature AM qualification and certification, AM data management and AM business processes much more quickly.

There are other steps that we need to take in order to accelerate AM use:

• Increase collaboration opportunities across the AM community.

• Develop an AM data architecture that will allow us to tie all the AM data together across the defense enterprise.

• Work with our suppliers, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the Naval Supply Systems Command to source AM parts.

• Validate DoD cost models and manage the data rights for maximum reuse.