Each year the Department of Defense (DoD) spends multi-millions of dollars repairing vehicle components caused by corrosion damage. The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) managed a cross-industry collaborative team that developed a new kinetic spray technology championed by the Delphi Research Laboratory. This new technology will impact Department of Defense by significantly reducing corrosion related maintenance across all military services.
“The adoption of this new technology will also benefit automotive and aerospace companies who will save millions of dollars in their facilities,” said NCMS Senior Program Manager Steve Hale.
This achievement was recognized this week at the 2007 Defense Maintenance Conference held on December 3 – 6, 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The NCMS team was recognized by a “Defense Manufacturing Excellence Award” presented by the National Center for Advanced Technologies (NCAT). The award recognizes outstanding cooperative efforts on technology development between government, industry and academia. NCMS has received six of these awards for their amplified efforts in cross-industry collaboration in the Department of Defense, Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program.
The NCMS project participants included all the branches of the armed services, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and the cross-industry companies: The Boeing Company, Delphi Corporation, Ford Motor Company, CenterLine Ltd. and Solidica. The average CTMA technology transition is 12 months to initial operational capability and 24 months to return on investment with a goal for full deployment across all armed services.
“NCMS projects allow us to conduct world-class research through networking and cooperation with today’s brightest and best companies,” said Project Member, CenterLine Ltd.,General Manager Wally Birtch. “The DoD gained the capability to salvage millions of dollars of parts through the project while we have opened up a new channel for sales of our technology to increase aircraft readiness.” “The Kinetic Spray project enabled us to expand our core competencies in Ultrasonic Consolidation of Aluminum to encompass into advanced leading-edge engineering material,” said Anu Gupta, Materials Research Engineer, Solidica located in Ann Arbor, MI.
This new technology has had a significant impact on material readiness by increasing the number of aircraft, ships and ground vehicles that are now available to our war fighters. “The success of the Kinetic Spray project brings us one step closer to realizing our expeditionary maintenance goals. We continuously need to look at ways to implement new technologies and realize their benefits over and across the Department of Defense.” said Greg Kilchenstein, OSD Program Manager, Office of the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense.
