The past few years have shown us the weaknesses in our global supply chain and the domino effect that can occur when they are disrupted. Nearly every industry has recently experienced supply chain challenges of their own, but the biggest concern are key infrastructure industries like oil and gas, energy, and transportation. Many of the legacy mission-critical parts required to keep these industries in operation have come under heavy strain due to the manufacturing plans being established decades ago and no longer being able to be reproduced. This issue has been compounded by the global COVID pandemic leaving customers struggling to find parts for regular maintenance, repair, and operations.
Metal additive manufacturing has long been considered a possible solution to the issue above, but it has not been able to deliver consistent and repeatable results when trying to reproduce a qualified part at a later date without requalification efforts. However, IMI Critical Engineering, a supplier of mission-critical parts for oil and gas and power generation, had a decade of experience working with metal additive manufacturing has taken the next step in its journey, which is to produce qualified parts around the world without having to requalify each individual time. After proving it could additively manufacture valves per industry specifications, the company began exploring a way to create a distributed supply chain that could produce identical valves at different locations across the world.
This session will explore how IMI Critical Engineering produced 14 identical valves across seven different sites in three different continents. Attendees will learn how the parts were qualified and validated with the customer and shown to perform in spec. They will also learn about considerations that must be made when creating distributed supply chains using additive manufacturing.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the common challenges engineers face when exploring additive manufacturing for distributed supply chains, including variances that can occur from machine-to-machine, geometric and performance validation, and post processing considerations.
- Upon completion, the participant will be able to understand how a distributed supply chain can be built through additive manufacturing.
- Better understand the gaps that currently exist in not just producing a qualified part, but consistently reproducing a qualified part at any time in the future using additive manufacturing.
