Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize modern manufacturing. Within the Navy, AM is being investigated for use in land based environments in rapid fabrication, legacy part development and repair, fabrication of custom tooling, rapid prototyping, and novel designs with complex internal geometries. There are a wide range of materials from polymers to metals that can be used in AM. The ability of additive layer manufacturing to rapidly fabricate complex components enables unparalleled design freedom and design optimization that can change traditional manufacturing and design paradigms. Current use of additive manufacturing has been focused on controlled, land based environments. However, full exploitation of AM capabilities in a shipboard environment for Navy use can significantly enhance manufacturing agility. Inventory of parts can potentially be replaced with inventories of feedstock material. The objective of this project is to measure the impact (mechanical and geometric properties) the at-sea environment (temperature, humidity and vibration) has on manufactured parts. Our goal is to provide ONR a vision for understanding the potential for at-sea additive manufacturing and an understanding of the enabling technologies that must be developed before this is possible. This report provides a high level survey of the state of the art in additive manufacturing to help the reader understand the advantages and disadvantages of each process. This is followed by a summary of at-sea additive manufacturing experiments conducted in October of 2013. The goal of these experiments was to provide an understanding of the impact sea state conditions (humidity and ship motion) have on one additive process, Fused Deposition Modeling.
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