A research program is outlined that addresses critical technical accomplishments enabling the realization of a system for reliable production of fluidic components. Such components are currently used as control elements in a variety of defense aerospace applications, due to their extremely robust thermal and mechanical shock tolerance. Such devices also have the prospect for use in commercial systems, given sufficiently reliable and cost-effective production techniques. The research described here would lead to the creation of a system which would produce high-performance fluidics circuitry directly from a CAD description. Custom fluidic circuit designs would be produced in lot sizes ofone while achieving the demanding dimensional tolerances in high-performance advanced materials (SiN). Technical challenges leading to thecreation of such a system to be investigated in Phase I include: achieving precise and reliable automated part cutting, handling and assembly; achieving reproducible, precision dimensional control of parts inpreprocessing and postprocessing; and defining software design specification that permits automatic transition from CAD to CAM for fluidic circuits.
