1. 2016 Maintenance Innovation Challenge
Title
PROBLEM STATEMENT
BENEFITS
Reduce flow time and cost
One project reduced time for custom repair fitting by 3 weeks
Reduced wait time for form blocks by 2 months when cast from ABS plastic
Sustainment of aging aircraft presents unique challenges due to the lack of complete technical data, aging legacy tooling, and the need to rapidly respond to unanticipated repairs to a wide variety of aircraft and exchangeable end items.
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
GRAPHIC
Leveraged 3D laser scanning, additive manufacturing, and castable materials
Solutions include using fused deposition modeling to print weld fixtures containing internal flow cavities for argon cooling out of high temperature Ultem based polymer material to resist melting