Fairmount Technologies landed a $149,551 Phase 1 STTR grant from the Department of Defense to demonstrate how its flow-type CNC machining technology can help Air Force maintenance depots make replacement parts for older aircraft without having to reproduce the original tooling and part-specific holding fixtures used in the original manufacturing process.
Hal Pluenneke, Fairmount Technologies
“Not only does it reduce the cost of acquiring the parts, it also greatly reduces the lead-time required,” Fairmount Technologies marketing manager Hal Pluenneke told the 4thEst8. “And the big problem is many of these aircrafts, there’s limited numbers of them, so that if you take just one B52 out of the rotation it’s a large percentage of things that are not available to do their mission. And on some critical aircraft, like for the nuclear weapons systems, J-Star airplanes, that’s even more critical because there’s less than 20 of those airplanes.”
The Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex in Georgia and the Oklahoma City Air Logistic Complex are responsible for maintaining aircraft for the Air Force. If they can’t source a replacement part, they need to make one. While manufacturer data on these parts is still around, it is tied to manufacturing processes that would take a lot of time and money to duplicate for one-off or limited run parts. Fairmount Technologies was founded in 2010 to develop a series of technologies to extrude and form wrought aircraft parts that meet existing standards so that they don’t have to be re-qualified, and without all the expensive tooling.
“By using new, modern CNC multi-channel forming movements on a machine we can actually form those parts without having to make a tool,” Pluenneke said. “If they’ve got a 3D model from that drawing… and they know what it’s made out of, our machine can take that data and if you have the extrusion that is the right size… they can make it into any part that they had had before by forming it an then we can machine it also.”
The Wichita, Kansas based company has brought in more than $3 million in SBIR grants in the past 11 years, but this is it’s first STTR – the primary difference being that STTR grants form a partnership with researchers at an educational institution. Two graduate engineers from Wichita State University are working on this project with Fairmount Technologies.
Part of the work they’re doing involves gathering background information from the Air Force so they can integrate it into their processes. The goal is to put their machines at the point of use for greater commercialization of their technology in factories and depot’s.
