- Email: [email protected]
DARPA: inventing the future of military technology
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
www.reinforcedplastics.com
FEATURE
DARPA: inventing the future of military technology Django Mathijsen Reinforced Plastics talks to Mick Maher, program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He gives us a glimpse of his future vision for composites technology, projects DARPA is currently funding, and how companies, universities and research institutions can get to work for DARPA. DARPA (at certain periods of their history known as ‘ARPA’) is the agency of the United States Department of Defense charged with developing breakthrough technologies for national security. It was created in 1958 in response to the Russian launch of Sputnik. President Eisenhower wanted to make sure that the US would never be caught off guard technologically again. And so for over fifty years, DARPA’s mission has been to look ahead and make groundbreaking pivotal investments in technology. The agency has had a crucial role in the development of technologies like robots, driverless cars and the internet. DARPA (www.DARPA.mil) focuses on short-term (two to four year) projects run by small, purpose-built teams. Many of their technologies flow directly into military use. Others are released into the commercial world, resulting in their cost going down, so they can come back into defense purposes in a more cost-effective form. The agency catalyzes research in a wide variety of technical areas, from biological to tactical technology. It is divided into different offices. The directors of every office determine what it is, which they would like to have realized from a technological standpoint. Program managers then set to work to get it done. ‘Program managers have a finite time and budget to make a project happen,’ says Mick Maher, a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO). ‘We fund people to conduct that research on our behalf.’ Maher came into the job with a lot of experience. He got his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Loyola College in Maryland in 1983 and spent twenty years working in manufacturing for companies like Martin Marietta and DuPont, working his way up E-mail address: [email protected].
to management positions. After 9/11 he went to work for the Army Research Laboratory where he was Chief of the Composite and Hybrid Materials Branch and Materials Applications Branch. He has been working for DARPA since 2011.
How to take composites to the next level He feels that in order to take composites to the next level, we need a new way of looking at how to manufacture them: ‘The automotive industry has a lot of experience forming and molding composites. The problem with automotive composite materials is that they never really achieve the performance needed for the aerospace industry and defense applications. The composite material systems we use on the aerospace side are typically continuous carbon fiber. When parts are fabricated using manufacturing techniques from the automotive industry with aerospace composites, they are unable to meet the aerospace requirements.’ The challenge is to develop new manufacturing technologies that can achieve aerospace and military performance levels at automotive price points. As Maher explains: ‘Both industries, aerospace and automotive, would benefit if we can find a common material and manufacturing solution.’ ‘Cost is important in military applications as well, as the government is always trying to make better use of taxpayers’ dollars,’ Maher says. ‘That said, in the military we have to have performance because we have lives at stake and the military platforms are expected to be operational for decades.’ So is the difference that the aerospace industry has been relying more on thermoset composites, whereas the automotive industry mainly focuses on thermoplastics, enabling them to manufacture more quickly and in higher volumes? ‘No,’ says Maher. ‘I think the difference mainly has to do with the fact that the aerospace market
0034-3617/ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.repl.2015.08.048
233
FEATURE
typically uses continuous reinforcements, whereas the automotive industry tends to use things like sheet molding compounds and short fiber systems.’
TRUST
FEATURE
TRUST (Transition Reliable Unitized Structure) is a current DARPA project that could lower the cost of composites for military purposes. The idea is to try to reduce the number of parts by consolidation. ‘Today we bond parts,’ Maher says. ‘But because we really do not trust those bonding operations, we install rivets and fasteners in the structure to ensure structural integrity.’ The TRUST project is set up to look at the manufacturing environment and gather all the data necessary to understand what is driving the process. If successful, you can predict from manufacturing parameters exactly how strong a bond is going to be. That means you could do away with all the rivets and bolts and consolidate dozens of parts into one or two, leading to more affordable military platforms. ‘The ultimate success for the program would be to have a completely unitized structure,’ Maher says. ‘That means an aircraft structure completely bonded together with no rivets or bolts.’ Bonding is very important in the military because they use a lot of thermoset composites. Now that thermoplastic composites are finding wider use in the aircraft industry, welding is becoming an increasingly important technique. So you might expect that DARPA now has programs to catalyze the development of welding
DARPA’s Open Manufacturing Program methodology. 234
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
techniques, but you would be wrong. ‘DARPA was involved in thermoplastic welding back in 1993,’ Maher explains. ‘We had a program called WeldTech as part of the affordable polymer matrix composites program. This program looked at welding hi-tech thermoplastics like PEEK (polyether ether ketone) and PEKK (polyether ketone ketone).’ This illustrates what DARPA is about: what the industry is doing now, DARPA was looking at two decades ago. ‘It is our job to make those early investments to push the technology or show its capabilities,’ Maher says. ‘When the technology gets adopted, DARPA does not invest in it anymore.’ TRUST is part of DARPA’s Open Manufacturing program run by Maher, which is looking at how to build confidence in manufacturing technologies. ‘When I started out in 1983 I was a production support engineer for the bond shop at Martin Marietta, and I used to worry about maybe 9 parameters,’ Maher says. ‘In TRUST we are watching almost 540 different parameters that we think might affect the bond line. By doing design experiments and probabilistic process modeling we are beginning to figure out what actually matters to achieve a good bond. Back in the day we produced a lot of parts charts where we tracked things like temperature and humidity. You took that information, put it into a filing cabinet, and unless the part had a failure, nobody would ever use the information. In contrast, the TRUST program uses all the available information. The informatics in conjunction with the probabilistic process models, being developed under TRUST, will allow you to be predictive. This means, that by looking at the
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
Anyone can do research for DARPA Many different institutions can and do perform work for DARPA, as Maher explains: ‘On the Open Manufacturing program, I have a team that involves Department of Defense aerospace prime contractors, universities, materials suppliers and some of the tier-two and tier-three supply chains as well as small businesses.’ DARPA puts its solicitations on www.fedbizopps.gov and the DARPA website. And unless there is a specific classified nature to the project or other technology restrictions, these BAA’s (‘Broad Agency Announcements’) are open not only to American organizations, but to anyone, worldwide. Typically, prior to writing a full proposal, companies and institutions interested in working with DARPA, would submit a whitepaper against the BAA. Maher stresses that if you want to put a good proposal together, it is absolutely critical to carefully read the BAA, so that you really understand what is being looked for.
Manufacturing demonstration facilities In order to demonstrate the utility of the technologies that DARPA’s Open Manufacturing program is developing, two manufacturing demonstration facilities (MDF’s) were established. One of them focuses on additive manufacturing of metallic parts and is located at the Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory. The other one, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is working on the bonded composites.
‘I also gave the MDFs a functional responsibility within the program,’ Maher explains. ‘One of them figures out how to curate the framework and the process models that we are developing. The other one has become a curator of all the material data that we are generating. Being able to collect the data and make it available to look at and use, whether it is in their process models or for their design, is a critical feature of the program.’ As the process models are being developed, DARPA and Pennsylvania State University are already trying to get them out to the community so they can be used and improved upon.
Advanced Structural Fiber A DARPA program that has just completed was called ‘Advanced Structural Fiber’. The objective of this program was to determine if you could improve current state of the art aerospace carbon fiber strength and modulus by 50 percent. ‘Some of the techniques that were looked at included using carbon nanotubes to template fibers and controlling specific manufacturing parameters to optimize the performance coming through the carbon fiber furnace line,’ Maher explains. ‘Georgia Institute of Technology was able to demonstrate a 20 percent improvement in stiffness and a 10 percent improvement in strength. While this did not meet the objectives of the DARPA program, it is a significant achievement and has attracted interest from industry.’ Several papers were just published that delve into the technology in more detail, like ‘High strength and high modulus carbon fibers’ (Carbon Volume 93, pages 81–87, 2015, http:// authors.elsevier.com/a/1R3nt1zUA1U3b) and ‘High resolution transmission electron microscopy study on polyacrylonitrile/ carbon nanotube based carbon fibers and the effect of structure
Probabilistic process control for bonded composite structures: combining data science and engineering reliability analysis. 235
FEATURE
design, the materials and the process parameters you will be able to predict how the bond line is going to perform. This has a big impact on the qualification process, where people are beginning to use analysis instead of testing. It will cut down on cost and make qualification a lot faster.’
FEATURE
FEATURE
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
FEATURE Probabilistic process control can build the ability to predict bond quality as a function of the manufacturing process.
Probabilistic bond process control. 236
FEATURE
FEATURE
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
Darpa’s new Materials Development for Platforms (MDP) program.
development on the thermal and electrical conductivities’ (Carbon Volume 93, pages 502–514, 2015, http://authors.elsevier. com/a/1R8Fo1zUA1U6q).
The Materials Development for Platforms program A new program called Materials Development for Platforms has just started at DARPA and is being run by Maher. The objective of the program is to reduce the development time for new materials. Traditionally new material development takes ten years, whereas the conventional way of designing new products takes three years. This differential prevents new materials from being used since they are not available within the three-year product design cycle. The Materials Development for Platforms program is using an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) approach to reduce development time for new materials. That means using models to develop materials so you understand how the process affects the microstructure, which in turn affects the ultimate properties of the materials. If you know the design requirements a new material has to fulfill, ICME could potentially cut the development time for a new material, from about ten years to about three years.
‘Typically, the way it works today is we will look at what materials are currently available and we will design our platform around that,’ Maher explains. ‘New materials are often considered too risky and not mature enough so they typically don’t get into the platform. In order to be able to use ICME principles to make an impact on utilizing new materials in our platforms, we need to figure out a way to use those principles earlier in the design cycle.’ The idea is to define the requirements a new material should fulfill at the design concept stage of a new product. This way, you can design the product using tailor made, high-performance materials that do not exist yet, but will be available when the design is done and it is time to fabricate the new product. ‘If you are able to link the ICME approach earlier in the platform design process, the aperture of the platform designers as well as of the materials developers would open up,’ Maher says. ‘When the two communities are working hand in hand, in conjunction with the manufacturing community, an optimized solution can be achieved much sooner and new materials would be available to our platform designers. In order to demonstrate this, the Materials Development for Platforms program is using a hypersonics test case.’
237
www.reinforcedplastics.com
FEATURE
DARPA: inventing the future of military technology Django Mathijsen Reinforced Plastics talks to Mick Maher, program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He gives us a glimpse of his future vision for composites technology, projects DARPA is currently funding, and how companies, universities and research institutions can get to work for DARPA. DARPA (at certain periods of their history known as ‘ARPA’) is the agency of the United States Department of Defense charged with developing breakthrough technologies for national security. It was created in 1958 in response to the Russian launch of Sputnik. President Eisenhower wanted to make sure that the US would never be caught off guard technologically again. And so for over fifty years, DARPA’s mission has been to look ahead and make groundbreaking pivotal investments in technology. The agency has had a crucial role in the development of technologies like robots, driverless cars and the internet. DARPA (www.DARPA.mil) focuses on short-term (two to four year) projects run by small, purpose-built teams. Many of their technologies flow directly into military use. Others are released into the commercial world, resulting in their cost going down, so they can come back into defense purposes in a more cost-effective form. The agency catalyzes research in a wide variety of technical areas, from biological to tactical technology. It is divided into different offices. The directors of every office determine what it is, which they would like to have realized from a technological standpoint. Program managers then set to work to get it done. ‘Program managers have a finite time and budget to make a project happen,’ says Mick Maher, a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO). ‘We fund people to conduct that research on our behalf.’ Maher came into the job with a lot of experience. He got his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Loyola College in Maryland in 1983 and spent twenty years working in manufacturing for companies like Martin Marietta and DuPont, working his way up E-mail address: [email protected].
to management positions. After 9/11 he went to work for the Army Research Laboratory where he was Chief of the Composite and Hybrid Materials Branch and Materials Applications Branch. He has been working for DARPA since 2011.
How to take composites to the next level He feels that in order to take composites to the next level, we need a new way of looking at how to manufacture them: ‘The automotive industry has a lot of experience forming and molding composites. The problem with automotive composite materials is that they never really achieve the performance needed for the aerospace industry and defense applications. The composite material systems we use on the aerospace side are typically continuous carbon fiber. When parts are fabricated using manufacturing techniques from the automotive industry with aerospace composites, they are unable to meet the aerospace requirements.’ The challenge is to develop new manufacturing technologies that can achieve aerospace and military performance levels at automotive price points. As Maher explains: ‘Both industries, aerospace and automotive, would benefit if we can find a common material and manufacturing solution.’ ‘Cost is important in military applications as well, as the government is always trying to make better use of taxpayers’ dollars,’ Maher says. ‘That said, in the military we have to have performance because we have lives at stake and the military platforms are expected to be operational for decades.’ So is the difference that the aerospace industry has been relying more on thermoset composites, whereas the automotive industry mainly focuses on thermoplastics, enabling them to manufacture more quickly and in higher volumes? ‘No,’ says Maher. ‘I think the difference mainly has to do with the fact that the aerospace market
0034-3617/ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.repl.2015.08.048
233
FEATURE
typically uses continuous reinforcements, whereas the automotive industry tends to use things like sheet molding compounds and short fiber systems.’
TRUST
FEATURE
TRUST (Transition Reliable Unitized Structure) is a current DARPA project that could lower the cost of composites for military purposes. The idea is to try to reduce the number of parts by consolidation. ‘Today we bond parts,’ Maher says. ‘But because we really do not trust those bonding operations, we install rivets and fasteners in the structure to ensure structural integrity.’ The TRUST project is set up to look at the manufacturing environment and gather all the data necessary to understand what is driving the process. If successful, you can predict from manufacturing parameters exactly how strong a bond is going to be. That means you could do away with all the rivets and bolts and consolidate dozens of parts into one or two, leading to more affordable military platforms. ‘The ultimate success for the program would be to have a completely unitized structure,’ Maher says. ‘That means an aircraft structure completely bonded together with no rivets or bolts.’ Bonding is very important in the military because they use a lot of thermoset composites. Now that thermoplastic composites are finding wider use in the aircraft industry, welding is becoming an increasingly important technique. So you might expect that DARPA now has programs to catalyze the development of welding
DARPA’s Open Manufacturing Program methodology. 234
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
techniques, but you would be wrong. ‘DARPA was involved in thermoplastic welding back in 1993,’ Maher explains. ‘We had a program called WeldTech as part of the affordable polymer matrix composites program. This program looked at welding hi-tech thermoplastics like PEEK (polyether ether ketone) and PEKK (polyether ketone ketone).’ This illustrates what DARPA is about: what the industry is doing now, DARPA was looking at two decades ago. ‘It is our job to make those early investments to push the technology or show its capabilities,’ Maher says. ‘When the technology gets adopted, DARPA does not invest in it anymore.’ TRUST is part of DARPA’s Open Manufacturing program run by Maher, which is looking at how to build confidence in manufacturing technologies. ‘When I started out in 1983 I was a production support engineer for the bond shop at Martin Marietta, and I used to worry about maybe 9 parameters,’ Maher says. ‘In TRUST we are watching almost 540 different parameters that we think might affect the bond line. By doing design experiments and probabilistic process modeling we are beginning to figure out what actually matters to achieve a good bond. Back in the day we produced a lot of parts charts where we tracked things like temperature and humidity. You took that information, put it into a filing cabinet, and unless the part had a failure, nobody would ever use the information. In contrast, the TRUST program uses all the available information. The informatics in conjunction with the probabilistic process models, being developed under TRUST, will allow you to be predictive. This means, that by looking at the
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
Anyone can do research for DARPA Many different institutions can and do perform work for DARPA, as Maher explains: ‘On the Open Manufacturing program, I have a team that involves Department of Defense aerospace prime contractors, universities, materials suppliers and some of the tier-two and tier-three supply chains as well as small businesses.’ DARPA puts its solicitations on www.fedbizopps.gov and the DARPA website. And unless there is a specific classified nature to the project or other technology restrictions, these BAA’s (‘Broad Agency Announcements’) are open not only to American organizations, but to anyone, worldwide. Typically, prior to writing a full proposal, companies and institutions interested in working with DARPA, would submit a whitepaper against the BAA. Maher stresses that if you want to put a good proposal together, it is absolutely critical to carefully read the BAA, so that you really understand what is being looked for.
Manufacturing demonstration facilities In order to demonstrate the utility of the technologies that DARPA’s Open Manufacturing program is developing, two manufacturing demonstration facilities (MDF’s) were established. One of them focuses on additive manufacturing of metallic parts and is located at the Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory. The other one, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is working on the bonded composites.
‘I also gave the MDFs a functional responsibility within the program,’ Maher explains. ‘One of them figures out how to curate the framework and the process models that we are developing. The other one has become a curator of all the material data that we are generating. Being able to collect the data and make it available to look at and use, whether it is in their process models or for their design, is a critical feature of the program.’ As the process models are being developed, DARPA and Pennsylvania State University are already trying to get them out to the community so they can be used and improved upon.
Advanced Structural Fiber A DARPA program that has just completed was called ‘Advanced Structural Fiber’. The objective of this program was to determine if you could improve current state of the art aerospace carbon fiber strength and modulus by 50 percent. ‘Some of the techniques that were looked at included using carbon nanotubes to template fibers and controlling specific manufacturing parameters to optimize the performance coming through the carbon fiber furnace line,’ Maher explains. ‘Georgia Institute of Technology was able to demonstrate a 20 percent improvement in stiffness and a 10 percent improvement in strength. While this did not meet the objectives of the DARPA program, it is a significant achievement and has attracted interest from industry.’ Several papers were just published that delve into the technology in more detail, like ‘High strength and high modulus carbon fibers’ (Carbon Volume 93, pages 81–87, 2015, http:// authors.elsevier.com/a/1R3nt1zUA1U3b) and ‘High resolution transmission electron microscopy study on polyacrylonitrile/ carbon nanotube based carbon fibers and the effect of structure
Probabilistic process control for bonded composite structures: combining data science and engineering reliability analysis. 235
FEATURE
design, the materials and the process parameters you will be able to predict how the bond line is going to perform. This has a big impact on the qualification process, where people are beginning to use analysis instead of testing. It will cut down on cost and make qualification a lot faster.’
FEATURE
FEATURE
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
FEATURE Probabilistic process control can build the ability to predict bond quality as a function of the manufacturing process.
Probabilistic bond process control. 236
FEATURE
FEATURE
Reinforced Plastics Volume 59, Number 5 September/October 2015
Darpa’s new Materials Development for Platforms (MDP) program.
development on the thermal and electrical conductivities’ (Carbon Volume 93, pages 502–514, 2015, http://authors.elsevier. com/a/1R8Fo1zUA1U6q).
The Materials Development for Platforms program A new program called Materials Development for Platforms has just started at DARPA and is being run by Maher. The objective of the program is to reduce the development time for new materials. Traditionally new material development takes ten years, whereas the conventional way of designing new products takes three years. This differential prevents new materials from being used since they are not available within the three-year product design cycle. The Materials Development for Platforms program is using an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) approach to reduce development time for new materials. That means using models to develop materials so you understand how the process affects the microstructure, which in turn affects the ultimate properties of the materials. If you know the design requirements a new material has to fulfill, ICME could potentially cut the development time for a new material, from about ten years to about three years.
‘Typically, the way it works today is we will look at what materials are currently available and we will design our platform around that,’ Maher explains. ‘New materials are often considered too risky and not mature enough so they typically don’t get into the platform. In order to be able to use ICME principles to make an impact on utilizing new materials in our platforms, we need to figure out a way to use those principles earlier in the design cycle.’ The idea is to define the requirements a new material should fulfill at the design concept stage of a new product. This way, you can design the product using tailor made, high-performance materials that do not exist yet, but will be available when the design is done and it is time to fabricate the new product. ‘If you are able to link the ICME approach earlier in the platform design process, the aperture of the platform designers as well as of the materials developers would open up,’ Maher says. ‘When the two communities are working hand in hand, in conjunction with the manufacturing community, an optimized solution can be achieved much sooner and new materials would be available to our platform designers. In order to demonstrate this, the Materials Development for Platforms program is using a hypersonics test case.’
237