SPEE3D completes US Department of Defense RIMPAC exercise
August 15, 2024
SPEE3D, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, has announced the successful completion of Trident Warrior – the experimental portion of the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise – at the US Marine Corps Air Station in Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. SPEE3D deployed its Expeditionary Manufacturing Unit (EMU), a complete on-site mobile Additive Manufacturing solution, to manufacture eleven cast-equivalent metal parts from aluminium and stainless steel to be studied for their material properties and viability for repairing and replacing defence equipment in a contested environment.
Trident Warrior focuses on testing cutting-edge technologies, including Additive Manufacturing. A team of engineers from the Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education (CAMRE) manufactured cast-equivalent replacement metal parts from EMU for the US Army, Navy and Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. The goal of implementing SPEE3D’s proprietary Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing (CSAM) solution was to prove that Additive Manufacturing can help secure military supply chains by reducing the delivery time of critical parts from days to hours and at the point of need.
“SPEE3D is thrilled to be included in RIMPAC, the largest distributed advanced manufacturing demonstration the Department of Defense has ever conducted to date,” shared Byron Kennedy, CEO of SPEE3D. “In particular, Additive Manufacturing has been a major area of interest for the Department of Defense (DoD), and together, we have the same goals to train the military and implement additive manufacturing to print crucial metal parts at the point of need to support modernisation and warfighter readiness.”
Lt Col Michael Radigan, a member of the Marine Innovation Unit and the government lead on the CAMRE team for Trident Warrior 24, added, “CAMRE facilitates getting the latest in advanced manufacturing into operational settings and finds ways to unlock additional capabilities. SPEE3D worked side-by-side with our joint participants to further research on cold spray Additive Manufacturing and helped us uncover best practices to apply its unique capabilities in expeditionary environments.”
EMU combines SPEE3D’s metal Additive Manufacturing machine XSPEE3D with its SPEE3Dcell post-processing and testing unit, which together can produce cast-equivalent metal parts in hours instead of days or weeks, minimising the cost of disruption and downtime. The system includes two 6.1 m containers with twist locks, a ruggedised, mobile metal Additive Manufacturing machine that can produce high-density metal parts in a wide range of materials, and a fully-equipped post-processing shop – including a heat treatment furnace, CNC three-axis mill, tooling, and testing equipment. EMU can be transported on a single platform.
RIMPAC and Trident Warrior included approximately twenty-nine nations, forty surface ships, three submarines, fourteen national land forces, over 150 aircraft, and more than 25,000 personnel trained and operating in and around the Hawaiian Islands during the exercise. The events provided a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants.
