Research Summaries

Back CAD Interoperability for Navy Reuse in Additive Manufacturing (AM), 3D Printing, Maintenance and Training

Fiscal Year 2015
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Sadagic, Amela
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Preventive and corrective maintenance of mechanical components on Navy ships and aircrafts is a complex task that can have major impacts on operational readiness. In situation when a component needs to be delivered to a remote team (an off shore installation or ship), the final cost of transit and delivery can be further exacerbated if newly received component is confirmed not to be adequate, leading to a new iteration of physical delivery. This results in extreme and unplanned costs of the overall mission. We propose to design and test maintenance workflow that utilize the emerging capabilities of novel technologies like 3D scanning, 3D printing and stereoscopic display, ensuring that only fully tested physical components will ever be shipped to remote unit. This process can be seen as a virtualization of corrective procedures, where instead of physical components, local and remote teams exchange a set of virtual artifacts, test mock-up objects and resort to final delivery only when they are sure the new component is a perfect fit. This delayed and in-time manufacturing and transit, fully supporting the concept of smart manufacturing grid, represent the essence of policy that has energy savings at its core. The benefits of this approach will be directly applicable to many other segments of DoD and civilian domains.
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal