DARPA’s SURGE programme aims to predict the life and viability of additively manufactured parts
April 19, 2024
Officials of the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), Arlington, Virginia, USA, have issued a broad agency announcement for the Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Endurance (SURGE) programme. The US military researchers are partnering with industry in attempts to boost the use of Additive Manufacturing for critical structural parts by developing the ability to predict the life and viability of AM parts during manufacturing.
SURGE seeks to rethink and accelerate distributed Additive Manufacturing of critical structural parts by developing ways to predict part life directly from data collected during Additive Manufacturing in a way that is transferable across disparate machines, materials, locations, and geometries.
The programme looks to merge in-situ sensing technologies, process modelling, and microstructure-based fatigue-life methods to quantify the useful life of manufactured hardware. Predictions will come from extensive experimental validation.
The SURGE programme aims to demonstrate an alternative path to the current machine-focused paradigm of part qualification in Additive Manufacturing.
Today, most operations work to perfect the function of individual Additive Manufacturing machines producing material repeatably with known properties. This is done over months or years of process optimisation and material property testing at a cost that easily can surpass millions of dollars, researchers say.
Instead, SURGE intends to explore a new approach where the life of every unique additively manufactured component is predicted on the fly, with the goal of producing any part geometry on any machine, anywhere and at any time, while guaranteeing part life.
Companies interested should submit abstracts no later than May 9, 2024, and full proposals no later than July 1, 2024, to the DARPA Broad Agency Announcement Tool online.
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