Engineering Team Passes Full-Flight Qualification for F-16 Aircraft AM Spare Part in Just 30 days

The new design consists of three parts: two clamp halves and a flexible tether. The two clamp halves were designed and optimized to maximize their performance. The clamp is able to carry double the load of the legacy design while being 5% lighter. It allows the clamp to be stored as one piece, enables fitting with one hand by the technician, and it is tearable after the installation. Material: Henkel Loctite 3955 flame-retardant, chemically resistant thermoset. Manufacturing: Over 1,200 units on-demand per day at a unit cost of $1.25. Traceability: Every part is serialized to ensure provenance and inventory management. The team focused on developing a methodology that could be easily replicated and reused to create libraries of high-performance 3D printable parts. First, they reverse-engineered the legacy clamp design to determine the loading conditions. Then, they used the nTop Platform’s topology optimization tools to determine and visualize the load paths. Finally, test samples of the candidate geometries were 3D printed in two different materials and tested in the lab under different conditions. When new information became available or when fundamental changes needed to be made to the design, the design engineers were able to generate new geometry simply by altering the inputs of their workflow in nTop Platform. This way, the team evaluated over 30 designs in 30 days.