Additive Manufactured Smart Structures with Discrete Embedded Sensors

Today’s soldiers and vehicles are equipped with sensors and devices that are ‘connected’ through boards, processors/chips, transceivers, and micro mechanical systems.  To design, fabricate and embed sensors and devices on the warfighter and to connect them efficiently is going to require multiple advanced manufacturing technologies: Subtractive Manufacturing (CNC), Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Laser.  With three major manufacturing tools on a single platform, the user can manufacture a variety of products - from simple 3D metal components to macro-circuits with embedded components to RF antennas to laser machined parts to wearable printed sensors.  This is a powerful tool for the next generation of engineers and technicians to re-think ways to design, create, and manufacture things that are vital to national manufacturing infrastructures.  The combination of subtractive and additive tools allows components to be integrated into existing parts and, in some cases, allows complete manufacture of a part with sensors embedded during the manufacturing process. We anticipate extensive application in both the DoD and private sector by providing a computer-integrated manufacturing ecosystem that enables the user to explore design ideas, fabricate prototypes, and iterate as needed to maximize design potential using a 3D true 5-axis system; for some uses, the final product, not just prototype, will be manufactured with this tool. In the Phase II sequential we will build on the results of Phase II to continue development of an Intuitive Manufacturing Ecosystem (IME) designed around user efficiency.  The ecosystem is the integration of industry standard manufacturing tools and user support features providing the benefits of maintainability, usability, scalability, and multi-platform capability on a single platform. Apart from the tool development aspects, we will develop a new microscale 3D metal AM fabrication process using metal paste (not powder) and laser melting. In line with embedding process development, the direct fabrication of micro-sized metal parts has the potential to open new horizons toward miniaturization of sensors and devices.  As a separate task, we will explore directly printing shaped charge explosives from exotic materials, which can greatly help the development a system that can sense and rapidly activate externally mounted thrusters to limit the damage to a military vehicle and save lives. Direct fabrication of energetic structural materials and reactive metals using exotic metals can speed up the development of active protection systems for military vehicles from under-body blast.