Additive Manufacturing Implementation in Rotorcraft Sustainment

The use of additive manufacturing to produce rotorcraft components is challenging due to demanding material property performance requirements. The need to contend with high cycle fatigue, fretting, and vibratory loading conditions has driven our industry to use high pedigree materials that are fully characterized and with well established and understood processes to transform them into parts. No additive manufacturing processes or materials approach this level of understanding today, making it difficult to utilize the technology to manufacture components designed to be produced using conventional methods. This has limited consideration of the technology in the sustainment segment of our business. Customers have a quite different perspective. Additive manufacturing has been identified by the Department of Defense as a critical technology for the sustainment of their vehicles and weapons systems. Each branch of the military and the Defense Logistics Agency has resources and facilities established to support the proliferation of 3D printing capability. They have all experienced success producing shop aides, tools, prototypes, and surrogate parts to address real time, point of use challenges in depots and in some cases, at or near the battlefield. This success has prompted the DoD to challenge our industry to find ways to utilize this technology to address component shortages due to obsolescence, lost tooling, or a lack of qualified sources. This paper presents Sikorsky's activities and programs that have been initiated to meet this challenge. This will include approaches for component characterization and business case analysis used to evaluate the practicality of using additively manufactured surrogate parts in legacy vehicles.