Direct Digital Additive Manufacturing and Cyber-Enabled Manufacturing Systems

The technology of direct digital additive manufacturing (D2AM) has received considerable attention in recent months. Several government agencies and commercial interests are planning to explore D2AM to find solutions to manufacturing problems. The attraction of D2AM is the benefit of rapidly producing without fixtures or tools or human intervention customized objects of complex geometry not possible by traditional methods. The interest in D2AM ranges from fabrication of critical, high value aerospace metallic components to fabrication of objects having an organic look or as nature would have intendedⁱ. For D2AM to be commercially accepted, it must reliably and predictably make products. It must achieve consistency in reproducibility across relevant D2AM methods. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has launched a new basic research program, known as Cyber-enabled Manufacturing Systems (CeMS). The long-range goal of the program is to achieve the level of control over D2AM processes for industrial acceptance and wide-use of the technology. This program will develop measuring, sensing and control models and algorithms for D2AM by harnessing principles underpinning cyber-physical systems (CPS) and fundamentals of physical processes. This paper describes the challenges facing D2AM and the CeMS program goals to meet them.