An Expeditionary 3-D Printing Laboratory for the Battlefield

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific

EXMAN

DISCLAIMER This work was produced under the sponsorship of the Department of Defense. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense.

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How a squad of creative Marines teamed up with scientists from SPAWAR to create a rolling laboratory that can 3-D print just about anything that warfighters might need on the battlefield.

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific - San Diego, California Public Affairs Contact: James Fallin | Jim.fallin@navy.mil

Prepared for BEST by THE CENTER FOR HOMELAND SECURITY AND RESILIENCE

Submission Date August 14, 2017

OVERVIEW

SPAWAR | 3DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

Through the window of a Humvee, Lance Cpl. Cami May Snider watched the barren hills of Camp Pendleton roll by. It was March of 2016 and Snider, a 20-year-old Marine from Westerville, Ohio, didn’t have much else going on. She was a welder by trade, but here at Camp Pendleton there just wasn’t much welding to be done.

Snider wasn’t one to be undone by boredom, and this particular mission had piqued her interest: she was accompanying an MTVR 7-ton transporting something called EXMAN. She had no idea what it was, but as they rolled along on this lazy southern Californian morning, Snider found herself wanting to know more.

She found out soon enough when the convoy arrived at the USMC’s 1st Maintenance Battalion compound. There, Snider, a muscular woman with tightly woven blond hair, bright blue eyes and a clever, quick smile, met a team of Marines who were part of “Task Force Innovation.” The Marines explained that EXMAN, or the Expeditionary Man-ufacturing Mobile Test Bed, was a mobile lab that could be used to fix broken Marine hardware on the fly. Inside the trailer’s four walls was a computer running advanced design software, a milling machine and a 3-D printer. With these three pieces of technology, and a lot of quick thinking by Marines, EXMAN could rapidly—and inexpen-sively—create replacement objects of just about anything.

Their work was part of a collaboration with SPAWAR, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific. Specifi-cally, EXMAN came out of a SPAWAR program called JAMR, the Joint Advanced Manufacturing Region, which focused on the potential benefits of additive manufacturing to help Marines be more effective warfighters. JAMR was created in 2015 “to improve national economic competi-tiveness, preparedness and mobilization for security and defense.”1

‘Iron Mountain’

The goal of EXMAN wasn’t to supplant traditional supply lines. Instead, this team was trying to make a reliable and versatile Band-Aid fix in the shortest amount of time

EXMAN An Expeditionary 3-D Printing Laboratory for the Battlefield

possible. The replacement parts would be temporary by design, but function as if they were fresh off the assembly line, which in a sense, they were. It was a cognitive and technological leap forward, taking the Marines straight into the world of highly advanced manufacturing of the sort normally reserved for private firms in places like Silicon Valley.

But if there was one word that defined the U.S Marines, it was “expeditionary.” If this EXMAN worked, it seemed like it would be uniquely and perfectly suited to fulfill that goal. As a quick fix, EXMAN would potentially enable Marines to cut back on the so-called “Iron Mountain,”2

a term they used to describe the sometimes massive amount of replacement parts that often accompanied their missions, slowing them down and, in some cases, impeding their goals.

Snider says she immediately and intuitively understood. More than that, it thrilled her. Snider had joined the Marines in 2014 when she was 17 years old, straight out of high school. Her parents were expecting her to go to college, she says. “I had the means, but wanted to do something nobody else was doing,” she says. Her mother was furious. It didn’t help that Snider signed her paper-work on Mother’s Day.

On paper anyway, EXMAN seemed like it could be a solu-tion to a problem Snider had personal experience with. For the last several years, in her first posting as a Floor Chief at Marine Wing Support Squadron 172 in Okinawa, Japan, Snider had watched her fellow mechanics grapple with the problems of the traditional supply chain over and over again, growing increasingly frustrated with each broken part that came in.

“I saw how the mechanics needed things all the time,” she says. “They were always needing parts, and never getting them in time. It was a huge, huge issue.” Now, as she listened to these Marine innovators talk about their work with EXMAN, she knew she wanted to be involved—but how?

SPAWAR | 4DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

Later that day, Snider went back to her mechanic friends on Camp Pendleton.

“What’s something you’ve got that needs repairing?” she asked them. “Something with a long lead time?” The mechanics didn’t need to think for very long.

“Impeller fans,” they told her.

A Dysfunctional Supply Chain

Staff Sgt. Dan Bower’s voice booms out over the loading bay at Camp Pendleton’s Las Pulgas facility, where the Ordnance Maintenance Company (OMC) sits.3

“If I’ve got a Marine bleeding, I might buy some cotton,” he says, with a grin. “But it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop buying bandages.”

Bower runs the day-to-day operations at Task Force Innovation. He is a compact, intense man who oversees his unit of Marines much like he runs his five children: with a lot of love and plenty of vigorous encouragement. He’s articulate, ambitious and describes objects in simple, blunt fashion, often in terms of their “purpose in life.”

At the moment, he’s running through the problems that the Marine Corp’s traditional supply chains are causing for warfighters—the same obstacle Snider was grappling with. He picks up a plastic feed sprocket off a wooden table and holds it up, shaking his head.

“This is a feed sprocket. Its purpose in life is to push rounds into a gun. If we had to order every single piece of equipment like this,” he says, “we’d still be waiting.”

Standing beside Bower is Kristin Holzworth, a sprightly blond sporting gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, a crisp

U.S. Marines with Ordinance Maintenance Company, 1st Maintenance Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 15, 1st Marine Logistics Group, hold guide lines attached the Expeditionary Manufacturing (Ex-Man) shelter during a field exercise at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Calif., Dec. 8, 2017 (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Rodion Zabolotniy)

SPAWAR | 5DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

white t-shirt and a pair of converse sneakers. Holzworth is a doctoral scientist and civilian liaison between the Marine Task Force and SPAWAR, which devised the idea of the EXMAN lab and brought it to the Marines for imple-mentation in 2016.4

For the last 18 months, Holzworth and Bower have been building and experimenting, pushing the boundaries of 3-D printing to new limits in a military context. And they’re way ahead of the game. Holzworth’s SPAWAR and aca-demia chops fit well with Bower’s no-nonsense approach to science, and together the team has forged new ground with respect to innovation in the military space.

“A lot of military units have 3-D printers but they don’t know how to use them,” Bower says. “We’ve scripted a guide for others.” The U.S. Army, which has its own 3-D printing unit, sent a team to Bower’s task force outfit to learn more.

The site of most of their work is the small EXMAN lab, and the low-slung buildings around it where Marines toil with computer engineering programs and intricate design plat-forms. The EXMAN lab itself is housed in one dun-colored twenty-foot equivalent unit trailer, with a sliding door on one side.

From the outside, EXMAN couldn’t look more unassum-ing. But it’s what’s inside that gets these Marines excited. There are three key pieces of equipment: a Tormach 5-axis milling machine that has a component that works just like a lathe; a Fortus 250MC 3-D printer and a computer con-figured to run SolidWorks software. There’s also a healthy supply of spooled, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS plastic—the same stuff Legos are made of. Along with the trailer, the whole kit and caboodle is worth about $120,000.

But the creations that emerge could lead to millions in savings for the Marines.

While it doesn’t look fancy, this simple lab performs two technological innovations. The first is additive manu-facturing, otherwise known as 3-D printing. A traditional metal part in a tank, for instance, is often machine sculpted out of a hefty block of metal, much like a Rodin sculpture emerges from a block of marble.

Additive manufacturing takes just the opposite approach, feeding bulk material, most often plastic, into a design pattern and building an item from the ground up, like clay sculpting. It offers significant cost reductions, in part because you’re only ever using the minimum amount of base material required. Very little excess scrap material gets left on the cutting room floor.

The EXMAN suite can also create detailed blueprint-based objects that would be better suited to a subtractive manufacturing model, which is where the milling machine and lathe come in. In other words, it can feed a comput-er-aided rendering of an object into the lathe, which will then sculpt the desired object out of a base material, usu-ally a metal like aluminum, brass or steel. It’s the Rodin sculpture model, but it’s done quickly and on the fly. It’s high science, expeditionary style—exactly what Marines want when they’re in the middle of a firefight.

EXMAN sits right next to a Maintenance Bay where the Marines of the OMC, or Outboard Marine Corporation, work. It’s a huge hangar with blue doors. Inside, they can be found working on everything from tanks to rifles to night vision goggles. A massive Howitzer cannon called “Anubis” sits on the floor needing repair.

Some of the results of EXMAN’s work are on display here: propeller blades for a tiny drone called The Nibbler, fans, plugs, topographical maps, NVG mounts and holster clips.

All of these products are the fruit of the task force’s attempt to reduce costs and increase the speed of the supply chain.

The Abrams Tanks

Like all tanks, the M1A1 Abrams battle tank is a huge and complicated beast with a lot of moving parts.5 Stripped of its armor, cannons and treads, the engine block alone is bigger than a Honda Civic. But the basic mechanisms that make it work—belts, fans, filters and gears—are similar to what you’d find in a car.

Designed to roll unimpeded through all kinds of hostile terrain, the tank requires multiple layers of air filters and fans that keep the inner gears clean.

SPAWAR | 6DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

She showed her design to another Marine at the OSML, and together they continued to fine tune the design, re-measuring it repeatedly to improve accuracy. She printed out the first design herself, and then took it to the other Marine for a second opinion.

“This isn’t exactly what we need,” he said. But he was grinning.

“He was really happy that I had tried this,” Snider says. After some more measuring, they printed out a final prod-uct, both growing more excited as they went.

They took it to the folks at Task Force Innovation. The next test was to see if it worked. And, to their surprise, it did—sort of. The fan they had printed was plastic, whereas the original was cast from metal. When they put the printed fan into the tank it spun correctly, which was good. But it also got too hot too quickly—and melted.

They had succeeded in surmounting the biggest hurdle by creating a design file that actually fit and spin on the existing axis. EXMAN didn’t have a metal 3-D printer, so they sent Snider’s file to a lab on the East Coast, which promptly printed out a metal version and sent it back.

And when they put that replacement into the tank, it worked like a charm. Snider’s vision was on the brink of potentially solving a multi-million dollar problem bedevil-ing Marine units from San Diego to Washington D.C.

“It makes me really excited,” says Snider. “Having a metal one printed means there can be one more tank in the battle, and that’s huge.”

Operation Steel Knight

Holzworth had never done much camping. She liked the outdoors, she says, but only in small doses— a walk on the beach with her dog, or a gentle swim in the waves of La Jolla, where she lives with her husband. So she says she was a little apprehensive when she decided to take off to the deserts of Twenty Nine Palms in December 2016.

But this was no vacation. Holzworth was there for Oper-ation Steel Knight, an annual two-week long training mission that was months in the making. Steel Knight

Among the most important of these, the impeller fan, sits on the engine’s side. It’s metal, about the size of a small melon, with eight curving blades tucked into a circular outer shell. When the tank runs, pressure builds. When a moving M1A1 reaches 1600 RPMs, its internal system releases several repeating pulses of hot air, roughly three blasts a minute, that pushes air and debris across the tanks filters, called V-Pacs.

This process keeps dust, debris and hot air out of the engine block. Whatever makes it past the filter then gets pushed through to the impeller fan, which shoots it continually out the back. In essence, the impeller fan is a giant vacuum cleaner and exhaust fan in one. Without it, the tank’s engine would almost instantly become clogged and cease to function.

Marines could pay $1,421 replacing a broken impeller through normal supply lines,6 but it would take three years. Pay a bit more, $4,000 or so, and they’d only have to wait 18 months.

The Abrams wasn’t the only weapon to use the fan. The CH-53 helicopter had one. So did the M88, a recovery vehicle often sent into battlefields to pull wounded tanks out of the fight.

Impeller fans, in other words, were everywhere.

The First Fan Design

After her mechanic friends told her about the impeller fan, Snider got to work. First, she went to an Open Source Maker Lab (OSML) on base, a fabricating shop with some rudimentary equipment for building replicas and models. Using calipers and the SolidWorks software, she came up with a basic design pattern.

She went home and spent the weekend tweaking the design using sketch drawings and pictures. Usually, she spent her spare time studying for her classes in bio-med-ical engineering, taking an EMT class or going to the gym. It took her three days to get what she needed, a design she could take back to OSML and print on their small 3-D printer.

Her thinking was simple. “I wanted to make the mechan-ic’s lives easier,” she says.

SPAWAR | 7DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

would put thousands of Marines to the test, straining their capabilities and testing their training.7

For the previous year, Holzworth and the Marines of Task Force Innovation had been working hard to make EXMAN expeditionary ready. But all of that work had been done in the comfort of the OMC loading bay.

Now she was going into an actual training environment, with battle-hardened Marines using real weapons that fired live rounds. It wasn’t war, exactly, but it was about as close as you could get to one without actually deploying.

The location was spare: a vast stretch of desert laced with sand berms and barbed wire. The Marines took extra care to tend to the civilian in their midst. In the middle of the night Holzworth woke to the sound of a man’s voice yelling.

“Kristen, are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” she shouted back. Holzworth was a little bit nervous, but not about her safety. She wanted EXMAN to perform well, and she hoped that Marines protecting her would find a way to put it to good use. For the last several months she, Bower and the other Marines had found all sorts of creative, costsaving uses for EXMAN.

One part was a plastic attachment for a helicopter helmet that enabled the visual targeting panel to descend into the pilot’s field of view. If the attachment malfunctioned, the display panel wouldn’t work and the targeting system would be rendered useless. It cost about $1.20 to make, but the repercussions if it didn’t work could quickly spiral into the millions, and endanger lives. “If that piece fails, the pilot loses the ability to engage in targeting,” says Bower.

U.S. Marines with 1st Maintenance Battalion, Combat Logistics Regiment 15, 1st Marine Logistics Group, display the different production steps of a vaneaxial impeller fan at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Oct. 17, 2017. The original wait time and cost of the fan from the manufacturer is 36 months and roughly $1,500. With the 3-D printing process, the wait time is reduced to 14 days and the cost is $315. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Joseph Sorci)

SPAWAR | 8DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

The French company that manufactured the helmet asked for an 18-month lead-time for replacement parts, and the plastic addition cost $435. Plus, they only took orders in bulk.

There was no stock, “but we solved that problem,” says Bower. The file created by the SPAWAR program has been approved for flight, and pilots have flown with the replacement part over Camp Pendleton.

Another one was a rubber tie rod used in a vehicle’s steer-ing system. The 3-D printer couldn’t print rubber, so the Marines in Bower’s unit came up with a workaround: they printed the cast from which rubber could be made. With a cast in hand, they printed a new mold, poured a rubber tie rod and had it up and running in six hours flat. There were other examples, all useful, inexpensive and expeditionary.

But as Holzworth lay in the tent that night, gearing up for tomorrow’s work, she says she worried that the Marines wouldn’t actually need EXMAN, and that all her work would be for naught. In fact, the task force was concerned enough that they prepared an entire set of invented situ-ations so that they wouldn’t get bored. “We were all really anxious,” Holzworth says. “It was a make it or break it situation. And we wondered: would there be a demand?”

She needn’t have worried. Almost as soon as Operation Steel Knight kicked off, EXMAN was in demand and the lab was running 24/7 for the duration of its allotted time on the mission.

“The organic cases arose one after another, all the way to the end,” Holzworth says, “I was amazed atthe amount of business we were able to generate. That was the big takeaway.”

One of the first customers to roll up was an LAV-25, a light armored vehicle armed with an M242 25mm chain gun. The gun has three plastic feed sprockets, which help propel the rounds from the feed assembly into the main cannon. When these feed sprockets break, as they often do, Marines deem it a “high failure” item with a long replacement lead-time. The chain gun goes down and the vehicle is left largely defenseless.

Holzworth’s team printed out a replacement feed sprocket, which included design, print and installation,

in just under eight hours. Had the unit been forced to rely on the traditional supply chain, the gun would have been inoperable for weeks, perhaps months.

Another quick customer was the team driving an Assault Amphibious Vehicle, (AAV) which broke a fuel pump impel-ler (not to be confused with the fan), a small, rounded piece of plastic with six spokes that exerted a centrifugal force on the fuel pump to keep it moving. Without it, the AAV would “deadline,” taking it out of the fight imme-diately. The SPAWAR team replace it in an hour and 20 minutes, and the AAV was up and running the next day.

The items kept coming in, hour after hour, day after day. Each time, the story was the same: a broken piece of critical equipment threatened to hobble the mission, and the SPAWAR Marine team was able to replace it with a 3-D fix at a fraction of the time and cost of the normal supply chain.

In every case, the broken piece of equipment, while often small or seemingly trivial, was important enough that its absence would have had dire consequences had the situation been an active war zone. They ranged from com-munications to transport to life support.

“All of these problems would have taken somebody out of the fight,” Holzworth says.

Some of the replacements were minor, but nevertheless important: brackets for trucks to hold down essential gear, clips on soft-top Humvees, wrenches to tighten elec-trical wires on generators.

But in some cases they were essential for life, such as when they replaced the plastic water plug on the M149 Water Bull, which was leaking badly with no way to stop it up. In a desert combat scenario, a seemingly minor problem like that could very quickly turn into a major headache for overstretched and under-resourced Marines.

All told, the EXMAN team constructed 32 wildly differ-ent and often very complex parts for a huge variety of machines in just eight days.

SPAWAR | 9DoD Lab Narrative | EXMAN

A Workable Fan

Snider’s impeller fan got a lot of attention within the Marine Corps. The first round of testing on the metal fan went well and now the metal fan is being tested in real environments. In April, the Navy was ordered to begin additively manufacturing the metal fan. And a month later, in May, the Maintenance Battalion tested Snider’s metal design for 20 minutes at a maximum speed of 3200 RPM’s.

It passed with excellence.

Now the design is being placed in M1A1 tanks for instal-lation and extended performance testing. Ultimately, it will come down to determining whether the additively constructed fan is as strong, durable and functional as the factory machined one that cost several magnitudes more money and time to create.

“I’m confident this is going to be the resolution to the long lead time on these fans,” says Bower. “If we can work through the red tape, I think this will be a game changer.”

“Having a fully metal printed fan means one more tank in the battle,” says Snider. “That’s huge.”

Moving Ahead

The Navy has championed the task force’s efforts at the highest level. Last March, the Army visited Bower’s outfit on an educational tour. Then in April, Holzworth and others showed EXMAN to a delegation of distinguished military brass at the annual Ship to Shore Maneuver Exploration and Experimentation Advanced Naval Tech-nology Exercise. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert B. Neller, flew out and spent some time explaining the EXMAN to the Acting Secretary of the Navy Sean J. Stackley.

Bower says he appreciates the long leash his command has given him to pursue the kinds of innovations Marines need.

The lab’s work is now on display at the Pentagon’s museum. And it has been used as a test case by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the

Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy for Management and the Navy’s Director for Material Readiness and Logistics.

Bower has big plans for taking EXMAN further afield than just the Marine Corps. He says he’d like to see the innova-tions his team has come up with be pushed back into the private sector through corporate partnerships.

As for anyone who is skeptical of the innovative spirit he, Holzworth and others have been fostering within the ranks of the maintenance battalion, Bower is fiercely protective.

“Naysayers,” he says, “are course corrected.”

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andnavalwarfaresystemscommand/

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type=3&theater

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3 http://www.1stmlg.marines.mil/Units/CLR-15/Maintenance-Bn/

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7 http://www.marines.mil/News/News-Display/Article/633106/

marines-getting-feet-wet-during-opening-of-steelknight-2016/

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