Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Pratt & Whitney is a major aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of gas turbine engines for both the commercial and military sectors. Additive Manufacturing (AM) presents Pratt & Whitney with the opportunity to improve their supply chain and increase performance. Yet, given the complexity of their product and the volume of parts required to make it, Pratt & Whitney faces a significant challenge in identifying appropriate parts to be produced additively from engineering, supply chain, and business standpoints.

The motivation of this project is to optimize an existing process which was limited to close review of a small number of parts into a cohesive and sustainable methodology that will identify parts across a large catalog that are suitable for sustained production in AM. This thesis describes a two-part methodology for identifying parts based on their suitability to be manufactured additively. The first part of the process ranks a large set of parts using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The second part is a prescriptive expert review of the top parts at the end of which, a recommendation on whether to produce a part through AM can be made. This thesis includes a field study of a data set of 25,000 parts in which the AHP process was applied and analyzed. The field study succeeded in producing a ranked list of parts, the best of which moved on to further review by Pratt & Whitney for production consideration.