ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | APRIL 2024 16 development through sustainment to create a resilient and agile supply chain.” Orringer’s presentation focused on a newly established program: AM Forward, a partnership of several LSIs and the Biden-Harris administration to advance supply chain resilience via AM adoption. The focus of AM Forward is to help SMEs address three challenges: accessing capital to procure industrial AM systems, workforce development, and qualifying AM processes. Day Two Keynotes. Presentations by David Furrer, FASM, Pratt & Whitney, and Slade Gardner, Big Metal Additive, set the tone. Furrer discussed community opportunities, standards for digital certificates of conformance data, and the development, validation, and deployment of physics-based models. During his brief, he said, “Data management through data analytics and modeling tools provides for a more complete means of knowledge capture.” Gardner stressed that, “Manufacturing is a key word…manufacturing goes way beyond just 3D printing” (Fig. 3). He went on to say that a business without a quality manufacturing system (e.g., ISO 9001, AS9100, API Spec Q1) is irrelevant in the manu- facturing world. Further, he said that the major pain points small business owners experience are complying with requirements for protecting controlled unclassified information and cyber- security maturity model certification. Day Three Keynotes. Presentations were given by Jason Bridges, Lockheed Martin, and Wayne King, The Barnes Global Advisors. Bridges emphasized, “Working with LSI is hard.” He went on to explain that a significant pain point is that qualification is not transferable across LSIs nor across LSI business units and the SME must spend significant additional money and time to be qualified across an LSI’s entire line of business. King posed the question, “How do we broaden the use of laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing?” He pointed out that in a survey, 56% of the manufacturers indicated that uncertain quality of the final product was a barrier to adoption of AM. He stressed that, “Process optimization is costly and time consuming.” Consequently, he advocated for a demonstration and standardization of a process qualification methodology of feed forward control- iterative learning controls (FFC-ILC). PANEL DISCUSSIONS Panel discussions followed the presentations on the first two days. These discussions continued to set the stage for the breakout groups, providing important perspectives from key stakeholders. Four panel discussions examined the challenges faced by SME-LSIs from the perspectives of SMEs, LSIs, data consortiums and nonprofits, and software and data analytic tool providers. Panel 1: Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) Perspective. Participants discussed the pain points from an SME perspective including: AM process qualification and part certification; access to machine vendor software; value proposition and price point for embedded solutions; and control of intellectual property. Panel members discussed the results of a survey of the aerospace and defense industry, which identified barriers to the adoption of the digital thread including: protection of intellectual property; system inter- operability; lack of real-time supplier and production data from different systems; and the high cost of curating, maintaining, and managing the data quality of information being shared. Panel 2: Large System Integrator (LSI) Perspectives. The moderator kicked off the discussion by stating that a paradigm shift in the way AM processes are qualified and com- ponents are certified is required to reduce cost, accelerate deployment, and allow AM TDP to be used across type, model, and series of AM equipment. He stated that we must move away from fixing key process parameters and instead embrace FFC and ILC. We must move toward process qualification based on standardizing “freezing” the FFC-ILC process methodology. LSIs expressed the desire to establish a distributed AM production Fig. 3 — It is all about manufacturing (based on Slade Gardener’s brief[9]).
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