Rapid Part Qualification Methodology of Aircraft Metallic Components using Direct Digital Manufacturing Technologies

Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM) reduces cost and energy content of manufactured parts and enables producing parts-on-demand. The DDM process can reduce part acquisition time from several months to less than a few days. DDM reduces energy and machining cost by eliminating tooling and reducing by 10-20 times the buy-to-fly ratios of conventionally produced titanium parts. However, to achieve timely realization of these benefits, a rapid certification method is required for DDM of a wide range of metallic parts having diverse geometries. Presently, in order to ensure airworthiness, DDM parts must pass a lengthy and costly certification process. This significantly affects the Navy"s ability to use DDM to produce parts-on-demand. Thus, Keystone proposes an innovative method for part certification using a heuristic and adaptive approach and processing maps combined with non-destructive inspection, metallurgical review and limited mechanical property tests. The proposed project strategy envisions that an aircraft component can be composed of several standardized, building blocks of simple 3-dimensional geometric shapes and manufactured using'sweet spot'parameters and practices. These representative geometric elements of a component, when fabricated using sweet spot process parameters and manufacturing practices, properly tested for defects, microstructure and mechanical properties, will enable establishment of a qualification algorithm and used for rapidly qualifying additional parts.