Innovative Metal-Joining Project Reduces Warfighter Vehicle Weight while Offering Superior Safety and Build Efficiency
ANN ARBOR, MI – November 29, 2011. The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) was awarded its tenth National Center for Advanced Technologies (NCAT) Defense Manufacturing Excellence Award at the 2011 Defense Manufacturing Conference (DMC) this week in Anaheim, CA. Attracting more than a 1,000 attendees from the DoD, Armed Services, Industry, and Academia, the conference strengthens military and industrial capability through innovation, collaboration and strategic investment.
The award-winning collaborative team, managed by NCMS, brought together several small companies including Gravikor, the Michigan Research Institute, and SpaceForm Welding Solutions as well as the U.S. Army PM Light Tactical Vehicles division and the Marine Corps Maintenance Center Albany. The project team’s objective was to develop solutions for lighter, stronger military vehicles, allowing for the utilization of the latest lightweight armor solutions and improving overall maintainability. The awarded project, Deformation Resistant Welding of Space Frame Structures to Reduce Weight in DoD Ground Vehicles,¨ applied new innovations in welding techniques to dramatically reduce time and weight associated with traditional vehicle space-frame construction.
The team created a design for a new cage structure that would completely replace the current body structure in the military’s ubiquitous HMMWV (Humvee) platform. The NCMS team scrapped traditional old-school welding techniques in favor of deformation resistance welding an approach that produces atomically clean surfaces between metals to be joined. The result is a near-perfect surface bond with many benefits over the traditional approach:
- Elimination of weld fillers cuts weight, corrosion targets, and weak spots
- Deformation-welded surfaces offer a considerably stronger bond
- Easily supports joining of unlike metals, such as aluminum and titanium
- Fully compatible with advanced composite armor technologies
- Entire weld process is nearly 1,000 times faster than the traditional method
The solution is cost-feasible as well, requiring little additional equipment and practically zero added investment. We needed a cost effective, producible cage structure that will support mounting lighter composite armor and various vehicle attachments,¨ said Dr. Chuck Ryan, Vice President, Technology at NCMS and Program Manager of the project. It needed to be stronger, lighter, and very importantly cheap and production ready. With this technology we achieved those goals and significantly reduced the overall vehicle weight.¨
The Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA)-funded project demonstrated the potential for a substantial weight saving (~1,500 lbs) with a comparable protection level to the current FRAG 7 HMMWV.
Other advantages through the use of the DRW Space Frame Design include:
- ~50% reduction in required parts
- Rapid manufacturing process for cage structure
- Fully bolt in kit (no welding at the depot level)
- Requires no major modification to current HMMWV chassis
- Improved ingress and egress for end user
- Increased rollover protection versus standard HMMWV
Rick Jarman, President & CEO of NCMS, was asked to present all of the evening’s Defense Manufacturing Excellence Awards, including the honor his own company received for this project. These are the types of innovative technologies collaboration produces,¨ said Jarman, “at NCMS, we believe that true innovation lies at the intersection of talent, investment and infrastructure an intersection that you can only reach by collaborating. This project is another win for our portfolio of successful collaborations. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and its innovation not just for this success, but because solutions like this save lives every day.¨
About NCMS:
The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, the largest cross industry collaborative Research & Development consortium in North America, is dedicated to driving innovation in commercial, defense, robotics and environmentally sustainable manufacturing. NCMS has over 25 years of experience in the formation and management of complex, multi-partner collaborative R&D programs, and is backed by corporate members representing virtually every manufacturing sector. For more information on NCMS, visit http://www.ncms.org/
About CTMA:
The lifesaving Commercial Technologies for Maintenance Activities (CTMA) program is a Department of Defense supported NCMS initiative that ensures American troops and their equipment are ready to face any situation, with the most up-to-date and best-maintained platforms and tools on earth.
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences 3025 Boardwalk Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108-3230 (800)222-6267
