For a specific tooling of the F-35 Lightning II combat aircraft, the team at Fleet Readiness Center East (FRCE) produced 2,000 tools in aircraft maintainers’ hands within days.
FRCE is one of the U.S. Navy’s principal aviation maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facilities. AM helps specifically with the production of an O-ring installation tool used for all three variants of the fifth-generation fighter jet.
The manufacturing process was completed in two weeks, less than 10% of the estimated six months procurement through traditional acquisition methods.
From a test run to mission completion in under two weeks
Innovation Lab Lead Engineer Jeremy Bunting said when the initial request came in from the F-35 Joint Program Office, he and lab technician Ken Murphy began working immediately to fulfill the order; the first step was determining which of the lab’s additive manufacturing technologies offered the most cost- and time-efficient solution. Bunting said an examination of the tool’s configuration and application suggested it could be a good use case for digital light processing. The team produced an initial batch of 20 tools, and the local F-35 Lightning Support Team at FRCE and the F-35 Joint Program Office began evaluation of the product.
Following the initial assessment, slight modifications were made to the tool’s design and the Lightning Support Team completed analysis and testing to confirm the printer’s resin medium would be chemical resistant and suitable for use in the tool’s intended environment. Now, it was time to print.
Bunting said the single order of 2,000 parts almost matched the Innovation Lab’s entire output for fiscal year 2024, in terms of raw quantities; however, using cutting-edge technology to meet fleet needs is standard procedure at the Innovation Lab.
Digital light processing was the process used for manufacturing. For those new to the topic, the technology uses ultraviolet light from a digital projector to cure and harden liquid resins.
Traditional polymer additive manufacturing machines – what most people envision when they think of 3D-printing, Bunting said – use melted plastic filament and lay that filament down into a pattern. The machine works one layer at a time, one part at a time. With digital light processing, the machine cures an entire layer at once, whether there is one part or 20 on the build plate.
“With the traditional machines, if I have a part that takes two hours to build, then three of those parts takes six hours,” Jeremy Bunting explained. “With the digital light processing, I did a batch of 20 and it took an hour and 15 minutes; then I did a batch of 60, which was as many as would fit on the plate, and that also took an hour and 15 minutes. That makes it extremely scalable.”
Demonstrating the ability to successfully produce a product quickly and on a large scale helps support the advancement of additive manufacturing as a routine solution within military aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul.
Since its inception in 2020, the Innovation Lab has made great strides in developing additive manufacturing as a capability that can be scaled up and used to address a broad range of uses. The goal is to continue applying additive manufacturing as a solution until it becomes as commonplace as traditional manufacturing is today, Bunting said.
“We already do a lot of local manufacturing at FRC East, with machining and sheet metal, and our additive manufacturing team has been working very closely with our production artisans to get them trained on this equipment,” he explained. “We want to be able to productionize additive manufacturing so we can quote it and work it just like any other job.
“My catch line is that we’re trying to make additive manufacturing ‘boring,’” Bunting continued. “It’s exciting and new right now, but I would like it to become much more routine – where additive manufacturing is just another thing an artisan works on as part of their job.”
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