Maintaining agility in the face of rapidly changing geopolitical forces is one of the central challenges in national security. Here, agility refers to the ability to respond to evolving threats by fielding defense and deterrence systems that keep pace with adversaries and meet mission needs. Advanced manufacturing technologies are being widely adopted across the aerospace, biomedical, and automotive industries to increase agility in responding to changing market demands. Yet their adoption in the national security space has lagged in comparison, largely because the technologies are advancing faster than the trust required to deploy them in high-consequence systems.
In industry, trust in advanced manufacturing is built through high production volumes and extensive product testing. In the national security space, where production volumes are low, extensive testing is difficult or impossible, and risk tolerance is extremely limited, trust must be built in other ways. In this sense, some of the challenges faced in national security mirror those faced in civil and environmental engineering, where adoption of advanced manufacturing has also been slow.
In this talk, I will discuss efforts at Sandia National Laboratories to transform a substantial base of technical knowledge and expertise in advanced manufacturing into the trust required for insertion into mission applications. In particular, I will describe how advanced manufacturing adoption can be supported by the development of computational design tools that create lighter, more efficient, and higher performance parts.
Ryan Alberdi is a senior member of the technical staff in the Simulation Modeling Sciences group at Sandia National Laboratories, where he conducts research and develops high-performance software for finite element analysis and structural optimization. His research has focused on computational design methods for components with nonlinear, multiscale, and multiphysics responses for which intuition-based or heuristic-based design approaches are often inadequate. He holds two degrees from the CEEES department at the University of Notre Dame, earning his bachelor’s in 2013 and Ph.D. in 2018.