Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing

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 com...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Nickles, Alexander
Other Authors: Lozano, Paulo
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139265
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author Nickles, Alexander
author2 Lozano, Paulo
author_facet Lozano, Paulo
Nickles, Alexander
author_sort Nickles, Alexander
collection MIT
description 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.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1392652022-01-15T03:48:08Z Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing Nickles, Alexander Lozano, Paulo Welsch, Roy Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Sloan School of Management 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. M.B.A. S.M. 2022-01-14T15:00:18Z 2022-01-14T15:00:18Z 2021-06 2021-06-10T19:13:21.215Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139265 In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted Copyright retained by author(s) https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Nickles, Alexander
Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title_full Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title_fullStr Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title_full_unstemmed Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title_short Identifying and Assessing Aerospace Parts for Production in Additive Manufacturing
title_sort identifying and assessing aerospace parts for production in additive manufacturing
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139265
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