SBIR-STTR Award

The purpose of this Phase I proposal is to verify the feasibility fro use of a robotic laser fabrication and repair system and to show how this innovative technology application will reduce costs of Warfighter systems and components, and improve performance and reliability. This system will provide impact in the shipyard, on the factory floor, in the aircraft repair depot and onboard ship. The number of potential military applications for this technology is very large, and provides the potential for significant savings of resources and time in production of military hardware, fabrication of defense relate components, and erpair and maintenance of esisting systems. Based on the integration of existing techologies into an innovative new computer-based process modeling and planning environment, this development will provide a demonstration of the apllications in Phase I. It can be applie dto large-scale or few-of-a-kind manufacturing, or fast production of long procurement lead-time parts, for the rapid prototyping of components that have real evaluatable and testable form & fit capability, and for repair and maintenance thru reforming of damagd & distorted parts. The system that will be developed is generally based on COTS hardware; and both the hardware and software is reconfigurable; The operator environments are intuitive, interactive and graphical. It will use a relatively low-cost PC computer-based 3D-CAD technology from Intergraph Corporation that is fully compatible with the Integrated Ship Design System currently under development for the Navy by Intergraph.

Building on successful demonstrations of concept, the Phase II project is proposed to have four thrust areas, three application task areas and one general software/hardware development activity. The main application objective will be to produce a working model of a jet engine airfoil foreign object (FOD) damage repair system- that uses automatic CAD data extraction, automated process execution, and laser thermal forming fabrication. In aircraft engine repair and maintenance, achieving this objective, lowers both a primary cost of operation and sustainment (O & S) for aircraft and allows a significant reduction to the overall repair depot exchangeable inventory. We estimate that between 10% and 25% of the FOD to jet engine airfoils can be repaired using our technology. The two additional, secondary manufacturing objectives are demonstrating the forming of heavy section components and/or for removing weld distortion for Navy Ship Production; and demonstrating the capability to produce “few of a kind” or prototype parts from thin and medium section metals. These three tasks would be effected through the completion of hardware & software-enabling systems; and demonstrated to the customer base on a commercially-viable, intelligent, automated, reconfigurable, thermal forming (hardware & software) system using a laser, or alternative heat sources.

Benefits:
We believe that there is a potential 50 % savings in overall (O & S) costs for the Navy and/or Air Force FOD repair costs, accounting for over 50% ($1.8B) of the total Depot workload and cost. Foreign object damage (FOD) represents as much as 50% of the repairs. Data we have accessed indicates that through using our automated controller and planning system, that the time for forming ship hull plate could be reduced from 100 hours to 20 hours, and the number of man-hours could be reduced from 100 to 3. We believe that each of these objectives also has significant commercial potential outside of DOD, as evidenced by the level of technical support and high level of additional cost share being advanced by our industrial corporate partners (over $ 700K.) We have been careful to select task areas that have broad corollary applications, paralleling and supporting the use of LITS-FORM for a variety of additional materials, processes and products.

Keywords:
laser thermal forming FOD turbine-repair materials process modeling intelligent manufacturing rapid prototyping hull plate forming model-based processing