ARLINGTON (Washington Insider Magazine) – Fragility in key elements of the industrial foundation is one of the biggest threats to the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program.
3D printing, or additive manufacturing, may be able to help.
A Navy program official stated this week that the Navy aims to match suppliers that can’t keep up with requirements with additional manufacturing organizations that can print components all around the clock to help enhance supply. According to Defense News, this attempt would target the most vulnerable components of the submarine manufacturing base, such as enterprises that make fittings, castings and forgings.
This, according to Matt Sermon, executive director of the Program Executive Office for Strategic Submarines, will assist such companies — many of which are the Navy’s sole suppliers of components — by trying to remove the pressure to increase process efficiency even as they struggle to keep up with the existing workload.
The industrial base currently produces two Virginia-class submarines each year, is currently working on a sole Columbia-class SSBN, and assists in the maintenance of the fleet’s in-service submarines.
However, fabrication of the first Block V Virginia has officially begun, with a mid-body Virginia Payload Unit that will increase the building workload by around 25%. The Navy will also purchase a second Columbia SSBN in 2024, with one-a-year manufacturing beginning in 2026, resulting in a massive increase of work for the top shipyards and their distribution network. The Navy has begun to refer to the years when it purchased one SSBN and two SSNs every year as the “1-plus-2′′ years.
Individual parts for submarines are now certified by the Navy. Sermon believes that part-by-part qualifying won’t work in the future and that the Navy should simply qualify the components and procedures used in 3-d printing rather than the parts that result.
However, the Navy has previously struggled to achieve this goal. Advocates for additive manufacturing in aviation wanted clearance to manufacture non-critical parts, but the Navy refused. The very first Advanced Manufacturing Lab was hosted onboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, however, the laser scanning and additive production tools were utilized to create parts for the strike group’s ships, not the aircraft.
Installing components on a submarine is just as dangerous as putting them on an airplane, and both communities have stringent safety regulations in place to keep personnel secure in the sky and under the sea.
The Navy will put the first components on an in-service submarine this year, according to Sermon, who claimed the work to install printed parts on submarines commenced in November.
The manufacturers who produce the parts will not be excluded from the process. Rather, they’ll assist with engineering and, if they have the technology, they’ll be able to print the final product.