Improving Industrial Base Manufacturing Processes (formerly Material Availability)
Abstract
The Subsistence Network (SUBNET) program continued to research and execute short-term innovative projects to improve the subsistence supply chain in FY 2022. The SUBNET program incorporated emerging technologies to address stakeholder’s requirements as well as leveraged supply chain innovations, best practices, and industry trends. The SUBNET program continues its pilot test in the areas of modernization and readiness analysis of joint food management system and improving subsistence visibility through enhancing receipting and barcoding at an OCONUS location. The SUBNET also successfully conducted research in FY 2022 regarding radio frequency sterilization processing of unitized group rations for two products, determining failure mechanisms of polymeric packaging materials to identify replacement laminate structures, and assessed the current unified combatant command and overseas subsistence functions by examining current operational and technological capabilities. The program also pursued small business innovation phase II research topics in subsistence to include robotic automation in military dining facilities, developing and promoting solutions for a kitting and assembly platform system that could be deployed in a short period of time, and develop innovative solutions to address moldy pallets in storage areas. SUBNET works with community partners (government, military services, academia, and industry) to conduct research and test and evaluate initiatives in the subsistence supply chain. The Casting program monitored awarded projects that were aimed to research, develop and deploy innovative and technical solutions to ensure a viable and competitive domestic industrial base. The Casting program continued its work with Academia, industry, and industry associations to continually identify future development and technical needs in alignment with the DoD and DLA to include appropriate strategic plans and roadmaps. These projects continue beyond FY2022 in areas of modeling and simulation, die coatings and lubrication, virtual reality, automation and sensor technologies. All projects working to ensure a viable supply chain in support of the warfighter. The Forging program continued to monitor awarded projects focused on exploring alternative forging manufacturing methods, materials to reduce production lead-time and costs, modeling and simulation software improvements and enhancements and improvements to post processing methods. We continued to see positive results from these projects, Ceramic Coatings for Forging Furnaces reported over a 40% reduction in Natural Gas usage and more than 60% reduction in recovery time for a forging furnace which was coated as part of this project. A few projects successfully finished and continue working on implementing the new technologies, such as the Direct from the Forge Intensive Quench project as it continues its transition to the forging industry. The Battery Network (BATTNET) program The Battery Network (BATTNET) program continued projects for improving the production readiness and technology transition for soldier and system batteries within the DLA supply chain. The program improved the capacity and capabilities of lithium anode production for current non-rechargeable and future rechargeable batteries at a major supplier. The program enabled UV curable polymer processes for rapid cathode production. The program prototyped and tested several versions of Bipolar lead-acid technology in major system formats to reduce battery cost and weight, improve battery energy and power, and extend battery shelf life and operational life. The program completed preliminary designs and safety tests with lithium titanate cells for potential replacements to nickel-cadmium batteries. The program continued managing Congressional Add projects for transitioning high value solid-state electrolyte products into key soldier lithium-ion batteries. The program continued to initiate and manage several SBIR projects in advanced lithium-ion battery manufacturing, recycling, and rapid materials synthesis. The Additive Manufacturing (AM) program, using market research, requests for information/proposals, Broad Agency Announcements (BAA), DLA R&D funded analysis of alternatives for the best cognitive computing solutions to integrate information from several logistics, engineering, legal, and supplier data sources into an efficient AM decisional framework. This analytics effort transitioned to the Military Services and will help uncover critical data in the decision processes for selecting AM as a viable option. The DLA AM R&D program also financed collaborative technical efforts from the military departments to enhance the AM product data management workflows that will enable AM acceptability and improve the overall responsiveness of an AM distributive manufacturing ecosystem. Another avenue to explore ways to accelerate AM acceptability included a pilot test on remote inspection capabilities, which rendered great insights into technologies that can greatly reduce administrative lead time in the testing environment. The reduction of R&D AM funding of approximately $0.943 million, resulting from an overall MANTECH $3.020 million directed reductions, impacted the DLA's continued efforts to identify the best technological applications to achieve precise robustness-repeatability-reproducibility of part fabrication using an AM technical data package in a distributed manufacturing setting.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2024
- Source ID
- 7ec737ea9554e67e16b960ddcc032bd4