Invited Paper AM+EM+MS+TF-ThM3
Additive Manufacturing Enabling Advanced Technologies

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 8:40 am, Room 211A

The aerospace and defense industry for the last decade has taken note and contributed to significant advances in materials and process capabilities enabled by the field of additive manufacturing (AM) to fabricate beyond state-of-the-art advanced technologies. Conventional and non-conventional industry partners continue to push the boundaries of next-generation materials and multi-materials for additive manufacturing in order to further extend product capabilities. As these material developments continue evolving, our industrial base begins to realize the many benefits of AM: reducing lifecycle costs, engineering resilience and capability surprise by rapidly reconfigurable responses to adaptive adversarial threats, and the enabling of truly agile manufacturing via AM integration with the model based enterprise (aka marrying AM to the ‘digital thread’). Some specific examples of advanced technologies are discussed herein, with examples of design iteration cycle-time reduction and use of material/process controls to verify by inspection and full characterization demonstrations of improved or unprecedented material performance and multi-functionality (electrical, thermal, structural, etc) made possible by additive manufacturing.