US military gets into the 3D printing business
- 18 October 2012 by Sara Reardon
Make me a new wheel if I explode (Image: Richard Nowitz/NGS)
AN ISOLATED military outpost in the middle of hostile
territory is a bad place for your equipment to break down. Replacement
parts and fuel either have to be air-dropped or driven through dangerous
territory. So the US military plans to make remote operating bases and
camps self-sufficient, able to generate their own energy and even print
their own gadgets.
Advances in radio, GPS and surveillance equipment have changed how the US military deploys its troops, says Bob Charette
of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office. Instead of being
bunched in large groups that slowly march across enemy territory,
soldiers are now strategically scattered in independent camps that span
an entire war zone. These can range from operating bases with a few
hundred soldiers to lookout posts of less than a dozen.
Such isolated bases are "the tip of the spear", says Pete Newell,
who heads the US army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF). But they often
have difficulty getting equipment. It can take months to receive parts
that need to be shipped from the US.
To speed up the process, REF has put
together three mobile laboratories in 6-metre-long shipping containers.
Each lab comes with tools such as plasma cutters and jigsaws, a 3D
printer that prints in plastic or metal and a scientist and engineer to
run them. The labs, which cost about $2.8 million, can be picked up by
helicopter and set down just about anywhere.
The first lab was shipped to
Afghanistan in July, and a second will be deployed next month. So far,
they have allowed soldiers to fix technical problems on the spot, Newell
says. "Every 10th guy has a great idea." For instance, the 54 °C heat
in Afghanistan was playing havoc with the batteries in a
ground-penetrating radar system used to search for mines, so soldiers
used the 3D printer to make a shielding case to protect them. It worked
so well that everyone wanted one, Newell says, so the team emailed the
design back to the US, where it could be mass-produced and distributed
among other combat units.
Soldiers have also used the labs to design hooks for defusing explosive devices, and parts to repair robots. Printing weapons
is not on the agenda, Newell says, although fixing them might be. He
also envisions printing more complex objects, like batteries and solar
panels, which has been shown to be technically feasible (Advanced Materials, doi.org/cm4r85).
Sherry Lassiter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's FabLab
says that the labs could be helpful for rebuilding an area after a
natural disaster as necessities such as drug delivery devices or
antennas for Wi-Fi communication could be prototyped and printed quickly
and easily. But she and Nadya Peek, also of FabLab, worry that for
long-term disaster relief missions that can stretch to months or even
years, resupplying the raw materials needed to run the labs might prove
costly. "The military tends to do things very expensively," says Peek.
From the military's point of view,
however, the price of the labs is outweighed by the ability to give
combat units an extra degree of self-sufficiency while lowering the
number of risky resupply missions that must be carried out.
"We can't be competing against the
fragile [fuel and water] infrastructure that's often the root cause of
the conflict in the first place," says Newell. "We're trying to get
those unit locations completely off the grid."
Soldiers stay powered on the go
Soldiers now carry 4900 per cent more weight in the form of batteries than they did during the Vietnam war, says Bob Charette of the US Marines. So the Corps is testing gadgets to decrease the amount of power radios and GPS need, or draw it from another source. The Lightning Pack backpack, for example, bounces as its wearer walks and can convert that kinetic energy into 40 watts of power - enough to power a radio.Naval Sea Systems Command, meanwhile, has created backpacks with solar panels attached for the same purpose. The panels charge bulletproof batteries, and a soldier can stay powered up for four days. The Marines will be testing these systems in Australia next year.
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