Adaptive Manufacturing to Scale Production and Integration of Third-Party Innovations across the Defense Industrial Base

The AFWERX Manufacturing Challenge outlines several focus areas for capabilities required for a more responsive and capable industrial base. The Air Force and broader DoD require not only greater production capacity – they require greater production agility and flexibility to dynamically reallocate national production against shifting needs. However, even as capable technologies to address Manufacturing Challenge focus areas are identified, the Air Force will still face long lead times to ramp up production of innovations, spending critical cycle time maturing and deploying solutions that address a single line of effort. Through continued engagements with senior Air Force leaders, Divergent has come to understand that the most effective solution for pressing manufacturing deficits is not a piecemeal approach, but rather a unified solution that addresses both production flexibility and capacity across multiple lines of effort, structures, materials, and more.  This Manufacturing Challenge project will focus on adapting Divergent’s commercial advanced manufacturing capability to meet adaptive production requirements across multiple Manufacturing Challenge Focus Areas. Divergent will partner with leading innovators across focus areas to not only manufacture prototypes meeting multiple focus area needs, but also research Divergent’s abilities to support and accelerate adaptive manufacturing for a wide array of DIB partners' innovations, using a common advanced manufacturing infrastructure within a single factory. Phase II lines of effort (LOEs) include: Rapid Additive Manufacture of Affordable Engine Structure. Partner with Pratt & Whitney to optimize and manufacture a critical component of a low-cost engine system with substantial demand across platforms, demonstrating speed and cost efficiencies over traditional methods.Manufacture of Hybrid Alloy-Composite Aerostructure. Partner with UAS-developer Flight House Engineering to demonstrate the feasibility of DAPS to rapidly manufacture aircraft assemblies that combine carbon fiber composite elements with additive metallic subassemblies.Scaled Production of High-Performance, Low-Cost Warheads. Partner with energetics manufacturer Deterrence Defense, Inc. to demonstrate rapid, scalable manufacture of high-demand warhead casings and scalably load, assemble, and pack (LAP) these warheads using advanced robotics.Redesign and Production of Defense Structures using Physics-based Modeling. Partner with the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) to develop a workflow leveraging NIAR’s physics-based finite element modeling (PBFEM) paired with DAPS to redesign, validate, and replace aircraft components.Analysis and Reporting on Agile Defense Production. Compile and assess data collected across the first four lines of effort (LOEs) to quantify the manufacturing efficiencies demonstrated through using common DAPS manufacturing infrastructure to support DIB partners across a wide range of production.