Rapid Manufacturing of Composite Hardware with Additive Fabrication

Composite materials, with their high strength to weight ratios, manipulative properties, and corrosion resistance are now widely utilized throughout the military. High performance composites are required for air, sea, and land platforms. One of the drawbacks of these composite systems is the excessive costs and time required for part manufacturing. Manufacturing of large-scale parts typically require expensive tooling, such as molds, and an excessive learning curve for manufacturing personnel. These issues are exasperated when a prototype is desired for evaluation or a low number of parts are required. Part redesign is also problematic, as even slight modifications can require new or refitted tooling. Often these considerations are enough to limit or bar the use of advanced composite materials, preventing optimal performance or improved capabilities. To solve this problem, Luna Innovations will leverage advanced gel on-demand resin technologies with modified additive fabrication techniques to develop a revolutionary, automated composite manufacturing process capable of producing large-scale composite hardware. This process will be capable of rapidly producing complete composite parts directly from Computer-Aided Design file input, without the need of expensive tooling or excessive labor costs.