Since its inception in October 2015, NAMIC has raised more than $50 million in private-public funding to support over 200 initiatives covering platform solutions, product development, SkillsFuture initiatives, standards development and certification. Together with the economic agencies, NAMIC has spear-headed AM industrialization efforts through its wide-ranging industry engagements leading to strategic partnerships and projects, growing the AM business community significantly and drawing entrepreneurs to Singapore.
As we plan for the next phase of AM development in Singapore as part of the RIE 2025 framework, NAMIC, together with its private and public stakeholders as well as local research community, has drafted the AM industry sectoral technology roadmaps.
This presentation will walk through some of the key take aways from the AM technology roadmap session, specific to the Aerospace sector in Singapore.
As aerospace and defense assets continue to age and exceed the lives they were expected to be in service, the need for spares and repairs continues to increase. Advanced manufacturing concepts such as Additive Manufacturing (AM) are required in order to reduce spare part lead times and the need for costly, long lead tooling. This presentation will walk through the AM technologies that are prevalent in this area, and will focus in on Large Scale Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), Hybrid Additive/Subtractive Manufacturing technologies, and Supersonic Particle Deposition (Cold Spray) for repair of aircraft structural components. A discussion around the advancements seen to date in AM for sustainment as well as what hurdles are still yet to be overcome will ensue.
Cold spray technology is an emerging spray coating process that uses high velocity (kinetic energy) impact instead of high temperature melting for its coating mechanism. With its unique working principle, the coating produced has numerous advantages over conventional thermal spray processes such as high density, low oxide content and minimal or no change in microstructure of the coating. Its distinctiveness presents immense opportunity in providing a new platform to address wear, erosion, corrosion and environmental attack issues. The presentation will provide an introduction to cold spray technology and discuss the principles of cold spray bonding mechanism. Key cold spray industrial applications will also be highlighted.
Cold Spray AM is proving to be a viable solution for the on-demand, low cost printing of spare parts for Defence and Aerospace. The rate of takeup varies depending on the application as new validation and compliance standards emerge. Inevitably this means that some applications are seeing substantial success before others. In this presentation, Steven Camilleri from SPEE3D will explain the current successes for Cold Spray AM in Defence and Aerospace and discuss how this interacts with the emerging validation and compliance standards.