Overview

The Standing Committee on Defense Materials Manufacturing and Infrastructure (DMMI) convened a workshop on August 1 and 2, 2013, to discuss affordable, low-volume manufacturing. The DMMI standing committee is organized under the auspices of the National Materials and Manufacturing Board of the National Research Council (NRC) and with the sponsorship of Reliance 21, a Department of Defense (DOD) group of professionals that was established in the DOD science and technology (S&T) community to increase awareness of DOD S&T activities and increase coordination among DOD services, components, and agencies.

The workshop was conducted as a convening activity. In accordance with NRC procedures, all participants provided individual opinions at the meeting, and no consensus findings, conclusions, or recommendations were developed at the workshop or as an outcome of the workshop. This report is a record of the workshop event prepared by the workshop rapporteur, and any statement or view set down in the report must be considered an opinion expressed by a knowledgeable individual participant at the workshop, not a consensus view.

To organize its workshop on low-volume manufacturing, the DMMI standing committee first organized a workshop planning group to identify workshop topics and agenda items, speakers, and invited guests. The workshop planning group consulted with Reliance 21 and members of the community to develop and organize the workshop. The workshop was held at the Keck Center of the National Academies in Washington, D.C. Approximately 40 participants, including speakers, members of the DMMI standing committee and Reliance 21, invited guests, and members of the public, to which the workshop was open, took part

in the 2-day workshop. The workshop focused on three critical issues relevant to manufacturing:

1. Low-volume manufacturing;
2. Use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment; and
3. Commercial manufacturing services.

Potential issues in the area of low-volume manufacturing to be considered during the discussions at the workshop included these:

• Computer-integrated manufacturing, computer-aided process planning, and the integration thereof;
• Flexible manufacturing systems (i.e., systems that most efficiently can handle a changing, highly variable mix of products and low-volume production); and
• Quality and evolving standards.

Potential issues in the area of COTS items considered during the discussions at the workshop included the following:

• The effect of commercial materials and processes (e.g., lead-free solder in electronics, fibers for composites) on long-term performance in defense applications;
• COTS certification for long-term use in military applications;
• Options for supporting long-lived defense systems given the rapid commercial adoption of new generations of technology; and
• Counterfeiting and malware.

Potential issues in commercial manufacturing services considered during the discussions at the workshop included these:

• Materials and processes that are unique to defense manufacturing;
• Dual-use facilities;
• Reliability of commercial items for use in military environments (e.g., extreme temperature, high humidity, shock, vibration, and radiation environments);
• Agile manufacturing—quickly switching among products and economically produced items in small lots for DOD and in much larger quantities for commercial markets; and

• Process qualification and product certification, including the incorporation of integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) capabilities into these activities.

To assist the reader, a short set of recurring themes from the workshop presentations and discussions are provided below. These recurring themes serve as a short description of the items that were addressed by multiple speakers or participants during the course of the workshop and identified for the report by the rapporteur, not by the workshop participants. The recurring themes are as follows:

• What constitutes low-volume manufacturing?
• Reducing the cost of low-volume production,
• Challenge of access to raw materials,
• Improving the methods of performing low-volume manufacturing,
• Appropriate incorporation of COTS technology and commercial manufacturing,
• Affordable process qualification and product certification, and
• Understanding the relationship between additive manufacturing and low-volume production.

Following the brief description of recurring themes, the subsequent sections of this report summarize the workshop presentations and discussions sequentially. Appendix A contains the statement of task for the workshop. Appendix B contains a list of all workshop participants. Appendix C presents the workshop agenda. Appendix D lists the acronyms used in the report.