2ARMY Automated Additive Repair and Manufacturing System Short project report

Abstract

Continuous development of additive manufacturing technologies, especially during the last decade, offers new opportuni-ties for manufacturing metallic parts. The possibility of producing the old and eventually no longer available parts in suffi-cient quality and maintaining existing worn parts will have a positive economic impact on the lifetime of related systems. It can be especially relevant for military use. The mobile maintenance units can be supported in this context with additively manufactured spare parts or the additive repair of the damaged parts. This should significantly improve the battlefield's most critical weapon systems and equipment availability. The project 2ARMY addresses the growing domain of on-demand production of spare parts and repairing worn metallic components. Essential development stages were done to allow further implementation of the mobile and widely autono-mous robotic cell for wire and arc-based additive manufacturing and repair of metallic components. Current challenges regarding the quality of additively manufactured parts have been addressed. An approach has been developed for the full-automatic acquisition of the actual part’s shape and computation of the difference to desired part geometry and automatic detection of the damaged regions. It allows to choose a particularly suitable manufacturing strategy. An appropriate 3D-scanning system has been found, and its integration with available project infrastructure is described. Algorithms for automatic detection of the damaged regions of the part, process optimisation for repair welding and a data-base for logging and analysis of the possible impact on the quality of the part have been developed. All techniques and methods developed during the project 2ARMY have been evaluated and approved on one military-related part. One damaged part has been repaired, and one spare part has been produced by wire and arc additive man-ufacturing.