Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
10/17/2014
The National Nuclear Security Administration is on the verge of qualifying a 3-D-printed part for use in a nuclear weapon for the first time, marking a major milestone in the meteoric rise of the new production technology. Additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing, is already being used to produce tooling used to make development units at the NNSA’s Kansas City Plant, with tooling that is used to make parts for weapons systems expected to begin this fall.
Experts envision a broad future for the technology across the weapons complex, from simple cushions and pads, which are among the first components being considered for use inside a weapon, to more advanced materials like high explosives and actinides. “This is a game-changing technology,” David McMindes, chief technology officer for Kansas City Plant contractor Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, told NS&D Monitor.
‘We Are Exploring Whether We Can Print Just About Everything’
Officials from across the complex say 3-D printing has the potential to save millions of dollars by reducing production turnaround times, cutting down on waste, and shrinking the footprint of production facilities. “We are exploring whether we can print just about everything,” Melissa Marggraff, deputy principal associate director for the Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told NS&D Monitor. Marggraff helps oversee Livermore’s five additive manufacturing laboratories, three of which do work on classified components. “The question is can it pass the qualification bar and is there a good business case for the nuclear weapons program to move that technology forward.”
Marggraff said she was unsure how far the technology could evolve, but “just because of the potential impact it could have vastly reducing development time, vastly reducing production footprints, the waste, we need to take a look at it.” She added, “What if we can save tens of millions of dollars? It’s worth it.”
NNSA Roadmap Bullish on Additive Manufacturing
The NNSA feels the same way. In an “advanced manufacturing roadmap” submitted to Congress earlier this year, the agency said it was embarking on a focused effort to develop 3-D printing for stockpile components. “Additive technologies are at various levels of technical and manufacturing readiness and hence vary in the time to potentially impact the stockpile,” the NNSA said in an unclassified summary of the classified roadmap. “With focused NNSA-specific R&D, additive manufacturing is likely to have broad impact across NNSA’s technology maturation and manufacturing programs for life extension programs.”
The agency said it was starting an additive manufacturing initiative to make “measured investments” in various products, though the roadmap did not say how much would be spent or in what areas money would be invested. The agency said it would transition 3-D printing research and development from laboratory- and plant-directed research and development to primarily program funding to support 3-D printing activities, with a focus on maturing the “most promising technologies to produce other stockpile components and improve our understanding of high risk opportunities.” The NNSA also said it would focus on areas where cost/schedule benefits can be found, and strengthen current capabilities for accelerated certification of 3-D printed components.
3-D Printing Paying Dividends at Kansas City
At the Kansas City Plant, officials purchased 30 off-the-shelf MakerBot 3-D printers for $3,000 apiece several years ago—the same printers that can churn out plastic trinkets and figurines—to help their designers become familiar with 3-D printing. “Not only were we changing our mindset with those 30 MakerBots but it ended up saving us about $6.5 million in the first part of this year,” McMindes said. “So tooling that we would make or practice tooling that we would have made out of metal or made out of our different kind of processes, we just print it.”
Marggraff said the sites across the NNSA complex estimate that 50 percent of NNSA tooling could be 3-D-printed in the next five years, which could reduce costs for those sets of tooling by 75 percent. It also could reduce development time by 80 percent and production time by 60 percent while improving the performance of the tooling.
Officials Envision Broad Application
Marggraff said that there is also hope that additive manufacturing can be used to produce experimental test objects. “We do a lot of testing and if we can use additive manufacturing to produce those sorts of one-off objects it could reduce the lead time required to be able to conduct those experiments,” she said. She also said the labs are examining whether 3D printing could be used for other NNSA missions involving weapons dismantlement or even in detectors, and she noted that Livermore recently successfully printed the first conventional high explosives. The lab is also working with the Y-12 National Security Complex on 3-D-printing tooling and other materials. “Just like in global industry, folks have been caught off guard by this technology and how quickly it’s been maturing,” she said. “That goes for folks in U.S. industry, folks in NNSA, folks in DoD and DOE as well as some of our legislative contacts. I think they’re very, very impressed with how fast this is moving. The question is how far can it really go? While many of us are very, very optimistic about how far it can go, we really need to do that research to understand the applicability of this. It’s going to take three, four years to really understand the benefits of it.”
Beyond the MakerBots, McMindes said Kansas City is exploring 3-D printing in four areas: metals, solid plastics, soft plastics, and electronics. Larger, more complex machines are able to print more advanced pieces, McMindes said. One example on display during a recent tour of the Kansas City Plant was the 3-D-printed housing for a W87 fireset, which previously would have taken a complex series of machining and welds to complete. “When you machine things you’re restricted by geometry,” he said. “Now I can actually print features inside of features, and so there are options that designers can now do that they never had before. To build up an assembly before, I had to machine a part, machine a part, machine a part, weld this, fasten that—now I can print that entire assembly as one piece and I can save a lot of time and effort when I do that.”
Pads, Cushions Expected Among ‘Early Wins’
Simpler pads and cushions that are among the closest to certification in the stockpile are expected to be among the first “early wins” of 3-D printing for the stockpile, Marggraff said, but she said there are more components that are close. “There are a couple additively manufactured components that are very close for the upcoming LEPs [life extension programs],” she said. “I’m not sure I can comment on what they are. But they are ones that are coming up in the next few years. And we’re developing other component options for future LEPs as well.”
McMindes said there was currently a “parallel effort” to develop 3-D-printed parts for use in a nuclear weapon, meaning 3-D-printed parts are being developed to mirror parts produced traditionally. Certification, however, involves a very rigorous process, McMindes said. “You just can’t print a part and set it in the weapon,” he said. “You’ve got to understand how it reacts. There’s no material standard to say, ‘Hey, if I take this and powder it and print it this way, it’s going to be like this.’ We need to understand that before we can actually put it in a weapon.”
Because of the rigorous process involved in certification, McMindes couldn’t be sure how long it would take for a 3-D-printed part to be certified for use in a nuclear weapon. But he was confident it would happen. “I would say there is a possibility, you know, that it happens this cycle,” he said, referring to current work to refurbish the W76-1 warhead, which precedes refurbishment work on the B61-12. “But even if it doesn’t, honestly—getting it into weapons is icing on the cake because the cost of the tooling, fixturing, all the surrounding stuff, we’re going to have a huge impact this time around. I think the next generation definitely. I think the U.S. is going to start moving in that direction where people expect to print things, they’re going to expect the customization.”
