Rapid Development of Weapon Payloads via Additive Manufacturing

MATSYS proposes to adapt emerging additive manufacturing techniques (so-called 3-D Printing) for use with reactive structural materials and demonstrate this capability to rapidly fabricate reactive case. Our concept incorporates two major manufacturing steps: 3D printing of green compacts from pure Al or Al-based reactive powder blend; and Microwave (MW) sintering of green compacts into net-shaped, structural components. MW energy has been in use for in a variety of applications for over 50 years. In the last two decades, microwave heating has also been applied very effectively and efficiently to heat and sinter metallic materials. MW sintering technology is emerging lately as having the potential for meeting the goals of better, faster, cheaper and greener. A key step in processing by MW energy is creating a green compact or preform to sinter into a net shaped part. Our approach will use 3D printing because it can create discrete parts of nearly any geometry in most materials that can be obtained as a powder. In addition, this process is cost-effective for low and high volume production. It is evident that processing by MW energy is a potentially low-cost, energy-efficient process for processing reactive powder materials into net-shaped parts.