Additive Manufacturing Is Cutting Lead Times from Years to Weeks

Large-scale metal additive manufacturing is helping engineers produce mission-critical replacement parts without the delays and tooling costs of traditional casting. By accelerating production timelines and enabling low-volume fabrication, the technology is emerging as a powerful solution for aging infrastructure, defense readiness, and supply-chain resilience.

Transcript

00:00:00 Here at the Geotech Instructures Lab, our mission is to create solutions that improve our nation's defense, security, public safety, and infrastructure. And we have some of the brightest engineers, scientists, material scientists here on our team that understand the challenges that our military and our civilian uh

00:00:31 workforce face. And we deliver those solutions by partnering with industry, academia, and finding the best minds out there to solve those problems. New technologies like metal additive manufacturing at large scales are just instrumental in delivering new ways to get after these challenges that our nation faces. So definitely utilizing added manufacturing is really

00:00:53 revolutionizing a lot of the the operations and maintenance community within our portfolio from N1 waterways navigation systems. Say I have a failed part. I need to have that part manufactured. It can take 18 plus months a lot of times for any component cuz we're talking about these really large cast infrastructure components. There's no standardization across the country

00:01:13 for any of these components. Casting hates that kind of um parts. we want to make a h 100red or a thousand of something. Additive doesn't really care. I don't have the upfront tooling costs that are associated with I'm trying to fabricate a component when I'm looking at using additive manufacturing. So, additive is actually not only more efficient and uh really kind of pushed

00:01:33 the timeline of how fast we can get parts manufactured, but it's also changed how we look at part manufacturer from a materials standpoint. So, there's a lot that goes into making these materials ready for defense and infrastructure applications. So for our military engineering portfolio, it's also vital because we want to be able to protect the war fighters of our nation's

00:01:51 military. So when we're talking about some of those materials, it's high hardness values. There's a lot of work that goes into characterizing uh different materials. So whether we're looking at quasystatic or high rate performance, leveraging a lot of these institute process monitoring methodologies in order to be able to capture all that data and have a good

00:02:10 confidence. um a lot of that information is coupled with uh thermal models or process models as we call them to be able to guarantee how those materials are going to perform. So the other side of that is also looking at scalability of technologies as well as pushing these technologies as far forward as possible. And so a lot of that forex application spaces is centered around uh bridging

00:02:31 systems say like railway steel to support a lot of our force projection mission area today looking at what industry and government have pulled together in terms of these large scale components have just totally changed the game. You know we can get after parts in a couple of weeks now that traditionally would have taken years to work. I I don't know that we can even predict the

00:02:49 future right now on future applications, but I know that they're they're on the right path to bring new solutions for our nation's infrastructure. It's aging. Uh we need new methods to maintain it and for our military readiness and deployability. This really gives us an edge to keep our war fighter uh in the in the game.