Large Format Additive Manufacturing to make end use parts for the USAF

A former grocery store in middle Georgia is now serving as Air Force Advanced Technology and Training Center.

The center employs now about 30 people and may eventually employ about 100. This lab is the second one like it in the Air Force. The first one is connected with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The facility is a satellite operation of Robins Air Force Base. It officially opened Oct. 24, and involves 3D Printing, also called Additive Manufacturing, as a key technology. Previously, 3D Printing had been thought of primarily as something to make prototypes, but now the Air Force is looking at using it to make end use parts.

The inside of the brick building —a former Publix store in Warner Robins— is full of gleaming new futuristic machinery, with large and very large format 3D Printers and 3D Scanners as starrings: In words of Maj. Ben Steffens, “Much of the work that has been done on the base has been done in the same method for years and years. This equipment, this technology, this material that we are dealing with here is cutting edge and will bring us to the next level as far as keeping our schedule down, keeping our cost low.”

Northrop Grumman: Additive Manufacturing for its new LEO Warhead for Hypersonic Missiles

In late March this year at the EMPI Test Facility in Burnet, Texas, Northrop Grumman, using Internal Research and Development (IRAD) funding, demonstrated its new LEO warhead for the first time to customers competing for the DoD hypersonic weapons contracts. This new warhead development marked the first time that the company had made some of its specific warhead components -including the fragmenting inner body- using Additive Manufacturing (AM).

This 50 lb-class warhead has been designed to equip future US air-to-surface and surface-to-surface hypersonic weapons to defeat a broader range of target sets, from ground forces to light/medium vehicles and aircraft.  The new warhead leverages the company's Lethality Enhanced Ordnance (LEO) technology: a scalable fragmentation/penetration warhead solution developed by Northrop Grumman in response to a US Department of Defense (DoD) requirement that by 2019 cluster munitions containing submunitions do not result in more than 1% Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) after arming. Unlike submunitions, LEO technology uses a thinned out shell casing supplemented with an inner fragmentation layer that can be scaled according to the required target set. Northrop Grumman said that in a series of warhead tests with LEO technology achieved the army's stated requirements for area effectiveness, and left behind no UXO.

HQ-9 vs S-300

The HQ-9 is China’s primary long-range domestic surface-to-air missile.

Outwardly, it seems similar to the S-300, using large flat face radars and a large missile that vertically launches out of a canister.

But since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, China didn’t receive that much assistance in surface-to-air missile development from the Soviet Union. Is the HQ-9 just an evolution?

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Naval S-300 vs Naval SM

Air defense is one of the most critical features of a modern warship: Planes represent some of the most lethal threats to a ship with modern anti-ship missiles and other guided munitions.

However, ships are some of the most ideal platforms to mount anti-aircraft missiles on, having a lot of power readily available and not being restricted by the same weight and mobility restrictions ground systems have.

The U.S. Navy has the capability to engage aircrafts with the SM-2 Block IV, which has a listed range of 240 km. This missile entered service in 2004, following a lengthy development process for the Mk 72 thrust vectoring booster that gave it a massive boost in range.

Russian ships only reached parity with this capability in 2015, when a version of the 48N6DM missile (adapted from the S-400) was integrated onto the Admiral Nakhimov, which could reach out to 250 km.

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S-300 vs B-21

A new generation of stealth technology is being pursued with a sense of urgency, in light of rapid global modernization of new Russian and Chinese-built air defense technologies; advances in computer processing, digital networking technology and targeting systems now enable air defenses to detect even stealth aircraft with much greater effectiveness.

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