LASER Induced Thermal Strain Forming for Repair, Production, Rapid Design & Prototyping (LITS-FORM)

The purpose of this Phase I proposal is to verify the feasibility fro use of a robotic laser fabrication and repair system and to show how this innovative technology application will reduce costs of Warfighter systems and components, and improve performance and reliability. This system will provide impact in the shipyard, on the factory floor, in the aircraft repair depot and onboard ship. The number of potential military applications for this technology is very large, and provides the potential for significant savings of resources and time in production of military hardware, fabrication of defense relate components, and erpair and maintenance of esisting systems. Based on the integration of existing techologies into an innovative new computer-based process modeling and planning environment, this development will provide a demonstration of the apllications in Phase I. It can be applie dto large-scale or few-of-a-kind manufacturing, or fast production of long procurement lead-time parts, for the rapid prototyping of components that have real evaluatable and testable form & fit capability, and for repair and maintenance thru reforming of damagd & distorted parts. The system that will be developed is generally based on COTS hardware; and both the hardware and software is reconfigurable; The operator environments are intuitive, interactive and graphical. It will use a relatively low-cost PC computer-based 3D-CAD technology from Intergraph Corporation that is fully compatible with the Integrated Ship Design System currently under development for the Navy by Intergraph.