A new OU lab will test metals for defunct Tinker parts

Brian D. King, The Norman Transcript, Okla.
Updated ·3 min read

Apr. 13—The University of Oklahoma is developing a new lab on the north side of Norman for metal additive manufacturing research that will allow the school to test metals used to create parts for aircrafts that are no longer being manufactured.

The university received an $8.7 million congressional appropriation award through the Air Force Research Laboratory in partnership with the Air Force Sustainment Center, Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex and GE-Additive to develop the lab.

Zahed Siddique, the principal investigator for the project and the associate dean for research at the Gallogly College of Engineering, said the lab will be used in cooperation with Tinker Air Force Base, where the aircraft are located.

"Tinker is the largest Sustainment Center for the Air Force, and they have legacy weapon systems, aircraft, and all of that that they have to maintain," Siddique told The Transcript. "Some of these are over 60 years old, so getting components can be challenging, because we don't have these vendors anymore."

The purpose of the new lab, which is slated to be completed next month, is to test the design and fabrication of replacement parts so they will meet the requirements to be airworthy.

Retired Lt. Gen. Gene Kirkland, executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace and Defense Innovation Institute at OU, said certification and airworthiness has several components.

"It involves providing very detailed information about the process, the equipment used, and the quality of the components to show this is both repeatable and an improvement from previous sources or methods," Kirkland said.

Siddique said the technology uses a bed of metal powders that a laser melts layer by layer to build the components, the process of which works well because these aircraft are no longer being manufactured and are their parts, so odds are Tinker does not need a large quantity of any given part.

"You can do almost any complex shape that you want and you can make a low volume, which comes in handy," he said. "Doing the molds, and all of that is going to be very expensive to design in this case. This way, you can just start by printing layer by layer. It is 3D printing, but instead of plastic, this is metal."

Prior to the $8.7 million grant, OU had received a smaller grant to launch a similar project on a smaller scale, which Siddique said helped the university to produce money from the Air Force Sustainment Center.

The new facility will house multiple printers, the same of which are found at Tinker.

"It's more of a lab environment where we will map manufactured components, and then we'll actually look at tests and try to characterize everything," Siddique. "So we will not be making parts for Tinker. Instead, we are setting up what is needed to do this type of manufacturing. We are helping Tinker to process the information to pass testing requirements."

By replicating the same machines as Tinker, it will allow researchers at the university to work in the same kind of environment where parts will be made.

Brian King covers education and politics for The Transcript. Reach him at bking@normantranscript.com.