Advanced Materials for Rapid Manufacturing

The goal of the proposed project is to identify, develop, and evaluate potentially advantageous material systems appropriate for rapid manufacturing by three dimensional printing (3DP) for military, commercial, and dual-use applications. This shall includea cost-effective experimentation system for identification of promising material combinations using: (i) generic principals of alloy design; (ii) fabrication of demonstration components to determine feasibility; and (iii) characterization of baselinematerial property information. This effort will lead to significant compression of materials system development for rapid prototyping and manufacturing by reducing the time for selecting and qualifying new or alternative materials and applications.Findings from Phase I will direct Phase II future work for development of selected materials and manufacturing parameters and to demonstrate rapid material qualification on weapon system components. The benefits of 3DP manufacturing include performanceimprovements and significant cost savings through reduction of time for building and testing new parts and prototypes, and fabrication of components directly from either CAD drawings or digitized artifacts. Significant acquisition costs are associated withextended development cycles of prototyping, test, and build; direct design to manufacturing using 3DP offers a rapid mechanism for validation of new products. 3DP provides a substantial dual-use application in direct response to the DoD's critical needs toquickly and economically provide spare parts for aging legacy weapons systems and eliminate the need for an extensive inventory of widely varied parts which must be routinely and automatically procured in order to maintain an adequate sustainmentstockpile.