Shipboard Additive Manufacturing (AM)/3D Printing

The use of additive manufacturing on board Navy ships offers the potential to be able to replace defective parts at a lower cost and timelier manner. There are three main issues in regard to using fusion deposition modeling (FDM) on Navy ships, including, the current inability of any FDM feed stock materials to meet the NAVSEA fire, smoke, and toxicity (FST) requirements for materials used aboard ship, the high humidity environment on board ship adversely modifies the process-ability of the feed stock materials, and the ship motion interrupts the orderly deposition of material during the part build resulting in defective parts. Texas Research Institute Austin proposes to develop a feed stock material that will meet FST requirements, develop operational procedures that will counter the high humidity environment, and to devise machine improvements and an isolation mount that will allow the FDM machine to operate through a wider range of ship motions. The proposed effort will result in a FDM system, including machine, material, and processing steps, that will allow the Navy to produce replacement parts on the ship while the ship is underway.