AlphaSTAR & Raytheon to present ‘Qualification of an AM Missile’ at AMUG 2019
March 4, 2019
Collaborating on a US Missile Defense Agency Phase II contract, engineering services and software company AlphaSTAR Corporation, Long Beach, California, USA, and Raytheon, a specialist in defence, civil government and cybersecurity solutions based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, have cooperated on a project to predict the Additive Manufacturing Process and Service Loading of an as-built additively manufactured part.
Using an ICMSE framework, and feeding through a building block Verification, Validation and Accreditation (VVA), the teams set out with the goal of identifying part issues before building the component, thus saving time, lowering risk and reducing scrap rate. The programme was co-led by Cody Godines, Structures Group Lead at AlphaSTAR, and Isis Roche-Rios and Alicia Leslie, Senior Mechanical Engineers at Raytheon.
“With the promise that Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) has in Additive Manufacturing, there are also major pitfalls – such as: defects, unmet net shape, high warpage, residual stress and surface roughness, void formations and inconsistent density just to name a few. We were able to simulate all of these with the GENOA 3DP tool within the Ansys framework before printing,” stated Godines.
Another key component of a successful build was the prediction of thermal history, material state, and process maps, which are used to predict all important phenomena and regions. “We found that knowing all of this information beforehand sets up for a successful final simulation with multi-objective optimisation of the component and support structure to minimise mass and scrap rate while minimising the pitfalls of AM,” added Leslie.
Leslie and Godines will present the success and further findings of this programme on April 1 in the International Ballroom at the Additive Manufacturing User Group Conference (AMUG), which will run from March 31–April 4, 2019, in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
