ROBOTIC INCREMENTAL SHEET METAL FORMING IN MANUFACTURING OF AFFORDABLE ATTRITABLE AIRFRAMES

Robotic incremental sheet metal forming (RISMF) is an advanced manufacturing technology that has great potential in enabling cost-effective production of unitized, aerospace-grade-airframe assemblies. The flexibility of the robotic system, the fact that it decouples tooling from material and design (i.e., does not rely on heavy, expensive tooling with long lead times), along with the capability to include other operations (e.g., drilling, cutting, bending, and welding) within the same robotic system, make this technology ideally suited for affordable-attritable airframes. Both recurring and non-recurring airframe costs can be lowered by deploying this technology while also enabling fast design iterations. This Phase II effort is aimed at performing the task of providing a physical Phase II work will carried out jointly by Machina Labs and Discrete Lattice Industries.  Focusing on a common demonstration option (i.e., a flight article of interest to the US Air Force), the team performed initial assessment of technical and economic viability of manufacturing lattice-based aerostructure.  This effort will translate in Phase II to demonstrate to provide an optimized solution for a plate lattice system applied to an aerostructures and manufactured at full scale. The objective of this proposal is to prove the manufacturability of a full-scale, metallic, metamaterial-based wing for low-cost attritable aircrafts.  Metamaterial-based wing designs furnished in Phase I of this program will constitute the basis of the designs that will be considered in this Phase II effort.  In addition to proving the manufacturability of the metallic wing design (top and bottom skins plus the metamaterial core) using Machina Labs’ robotic sheet metal manufacturing technology, validation of the performance of the proposed metamaterial system from small- to large-scale, across the entire range of features from joints to unit cell to several cells and finally a wing-sized component will also be examined.