3D Printing is Saving the U.S. Coast Guard Serious Money

[By Jamie Rand, Consultant C5ISC]

Simply as visitors lights and highway indicators inform drivers and warn them about upcoming hazards, aids to navigation, resembling lighthouses, buoys, and radio beacons assist mariners navigate waters and determine potential dangers.  

The Coast Guard is chargeable for sustaining aids to navigation in waters underneath Federal jurisdiction, and that upkeep comes with an more and more massive price ticket: based on a 2020 Authorities Accountability Workplace Report, “the general prices to restore and change aids to navigation elevated from $12 million in Fiscal Yr (FY) 2014 to about $20 million in 2018,” with “a collective substitute worth of about $1.6 billion.”  

The partnership between the USCG’s Shore Infrastructure Logistics Middle’s Waterways Operations Product Line (SILC-WOPL) and the Command, Management, Communications, Computer systems, Cyber and Intelligence Service Middle’s Electronics Restore Facility (C5ISC-ERF) has facilitated new strategies and helped decrease the associated fee to restore and change ATON – and in so doing, laid the groundwork for Additive Manufacturing (AM) to satisfy future wants of the USCG.

AM, often known as 3D-printing, allows the era of tangible, three-dimensional objects straight from digital design information. Simply as standard desktop printers use ink and paper to create prints, 3D printers use an array of supplies, together with polymer composites, metals, and ceramics to create objects layer by layer. Utilizing AM, C5ISC-ERF can create or recreate elements which are now not commercially accessible, enabling personnel to salvage degraded or broken gear and return it to serviceable situation.  

One profitable instance of that is the VRB-25 optical system, a typical 12-volt rotating mild beacon with an incandescent bulb, utilized in lighthouses alongside the USA shoreline. The Coast Guard started changing the VRB-25s with light-emitting diode (LED) techniques within the early 2010s, however regardless of the improved power effectivity, the LED techniques had increased restore prices and lacked the standard look — the rotating beacon and glow — of the VRB-25, inflicting navigation issues for civilian mariners, the army, and the transport trade.

Coast Guard technical authorities elected to reinstall the VRB-25 in lighthouses, which particularly require rotating beacons. SILC-WOPL, which serves as the point of interest for implementing engineering and logistics options for the USCG’s ATON enterprise, discovered that the decommissioned VRB-25 techniques had been sitting unused at Coast Guard items in varied states of disrepair — and even discarded fully — and couldn’t at all times be used to exchange the LED techniques. SILC-WOPL then contacted C5ISC-ERF to see which damaged techniques could possibly be introduced again to serviceable situation.  

Led by Mr. Man Stewart (retired), C5ISC-ERF started the sophisticated and distinctive restoration course of in late 2019, disassembling all {hardware} elements and changing wiring, motor bearings, and different elements, along with performing intensive corrosion mitigation procedures. For Authentic Tools Producer (OEM) elements that have been now not accessible, resembling the bottom basis for the VRB-25 hanger plate, C5ISC-ERF used in-house 3D printing expertise and recreated them to precise dimensions, with ET2 Kyle Perez growing the design and prototypes, and Mr. Stewart performing the verification and validation through engineering evaluation and harmful testing to make sure that the 3D-printed elements might efficiently change the alloy elements. SILC-WOPL decided that the 3D printed half was good for the use case, and C5ISC-ERF was capable of produce 18 VRB-25s for reinstallation.  

Even at this early stage, AM is already enabling fast options and making a distinction. Following a current Command Cyber Readiness Inspection (CCRI) at C5ISC, some areas risked failing cyber-compliance attributable to lacking easy emergency shut-off change covers. As an alternative of procuring the covers by means of common orders and ready for them to reach, C5ISC-ERF 3D printed the covers and shipped them in a single day. And in simply the final two fiscal years, AM has saved SILC-WOPL over $650,000 in acquisition prices and put 164 repaired items of apparatus again into stock.  

To assist higher leverage this rising expertise, the AM Working Group will quickly ship personnel to a four-month trade coaching and a six-week coaching with the Navy. The Working Group can also be starting to coordinate with the USCG Pressure Readiness Command (FORCECOM) to seek out distinctive and costly aids or prototypes that could possibly be printed extra economically, with some twenty to thirty elements into account, starting from out of date elements to security covers. Low-risk elements resembling switchboard or radio knobs and breaker blanks will assist the USCG develop an natural understanding of AM capabilities earlier than shifting into manufacturing of higher-risk elements.    

“The Coast Guard isn’t gradual to comply with swimsuit with AM,” stated LCDR Armstrong. “Principally we’re simply going about it logically and as engineering-sound as we will. There’s some phenomenal work occurring across the nation, like flight-critical elements already authorized by the Military and Air Pressure. We need to carry this answer house to all people.” 

This text seems courtesy of Coast Guard Compass and could also be present in its unique type right here.