AEVEX and Divergent partner for metal AM drone development
Divergent's Adaptive Production System shapes the airframes from the outset, reversing the company's usual retrofit sequence
AEVEX and Divergent have partnered to develop unmanned aerial vehicles in the “Group 2 to Group 3 UAV space,” designing the aircraft around Divergent’s metal additive manufacturing process from the outset.
With most of its customers, Divergent takes a standardized design and adds 3D printing to it retroactively. The unmanned aircraft systems and loitering munitions developed with AEVEX will instead be built around Divergent’s process, and around its Monolith One printer, from the start.
The partnership is not, in AEVEX’s framing, “necessarily about a specific platform”.
“It’s [focused] on the development and production approach that we’re building together… and we believe this partnership is going to accelerate the path from that concept to production,” said Manan Patel, Chief Technology Officer at AEVEX. The stated goal is to make the drones adaptable and mass-producible, so that production can shift as range, payload and other requirements change.
Designing to the production system
The Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) combines AI-enabled engineering and design, 3D printing and automated assembly. Divergent unveiled its Monolith One printer in June, a machine that uses high-powered lasers to selectively melt layers of metal powder, fusing them into solid structures.
Airframes printed on it included Tomahawk missiles, CoAspire’s RAACM low-cost cruise missile, and the “full Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) and Low-Cost Containerized Missiles (LCCM) list of programs across the industry,” said Lukas Czinger, Chief Executive Officer at Divergent.
Divergent’s new factory, a nearly 46,000 square meter facility, is primed to hold 64 Monolith One machines. Czinger said the plant would turn out 275,000 parts a year, along with more than 30,000 missile airframes in the 227 kg (500 lb) class and more than 60,000 warhead casings in the 45 kg (100 lb) class.
“AEVEX will own the requirements of the system, certainly the integration of it, and they’ve got great, proven technology across the avionics, electronics, etc,” Czinger said. “We’ll create this tip-to-tail airframe that is best suited for that [DAPS] process, for adaptability, for low cost, for volume production from Day One. That’s a big piece of it: designing something that is actually meant to be scaled, but also compressing that overall process.”
“Building ten autonomous platforms is an engineering problem, but building 10,000 is an industrial problem,” Patel added. “Working with organizations like Divergent, we think that the folks that are going to succeed are going to be the ones that can continuously iterate, especially as operator requirements change, and we think we’re well positioned for that.”
