Period SINTAS meeting:

Update work package 2B. Westerweel

Agenda

• Looking back on year 2

• First paper completion

• Key findings

• Looking ahead to year 3

• Identification of next research topics

• Discussion

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Traditional or additive manufacturing?

• First paper is on trade-offs between traditional and additive

manufacturing

• We take a lifecycle cost perspective:

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Design Production Exploitation Disposal

Unit production

costs

Component

reliability

Replenishment

leadtime

Component

design costs

Performance

benefits

Analysis: Evaluating break-even MTBF

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Case study: Valve block

• This case study centers around a hydraulic valve block that is used to

control bucket movement of a boom lift.

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Case study: Bracket

• This bracket is used to control the wing flaps of a business jet. Each jet

has one of these at the end of each wing tip.

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Main findings

• We find that for an AM component to be preferred:

• AM development and production costs may exceed those of the regular part

• The AM component may be less reliable than the regular one

• Currently, performance benefits are very important to offset high production costs

• We further find that:

• Reducing AM’s leadtime even further does not bring much benefits,

• which suggests that industry should focus on production quality and costs, instead

of production speed

• The paper has been submitted to Reliability Engineering and System Safety

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Second research topic

• This research focuses on the application of on-site additive

manufacturing.

• Inspired by on-site AM in Mali (RNA) and on board US Navy aircraft carriers

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• Some interesting research questions:

• Should organizations invest in on-site AM capacity?

• How does on-site AM capacity affect inventory

decisions?

• Should AM parts be used temporarily or as more

permanent solutions?

Decomposing the problem

• Several general problem aspects:

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time

Regular componentarrival

Regular componentarrivalPenalty reduction

Regular componentfailure

Print and install AM part

Depot PODMission

Area

Periodic

deterministic

service

Stochastic

service

• Strategic dual sourcing problem, with AM

capacity to protect against uncertain

demand + lead times

• Assessing the savings potential we can

achieve with on-site AM capacity

• Finite time horizon with first

stage decisions and operational

decision rules

Discussion on “Temporary AM”

• Will AM parts that are printed on-site match the performance and

reliability of regular parts?

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Regular part

Zero reliability

Never use AM, incur downtime

Use AM temporarily

Use AM until failure