Based in the city of Halifax on Canada’s East Coast, Dalhousie University is home to an Advanced Manufacturing Hub equipped with a cutting-edge AM-driven infrastructure. The hub, which received $3.7M (CAD) back in 2023 to advance AM for Canada’s marine defense sector, is now being used to strengthen operational readiness for the country’s navy. Specifically, Dalhousie engineers will leverage metal AM to develop and manufacture critical submarine parts that will keep Canada’s aging fleet operational for several more years.
In September 2024, the federal government of Canada announced its plan to procure a dozen new submarines to replace an aging fleet of Victoria-class subs used by the Royal Canadian Navy. This existing fleet, built in the 1980s, must however remain operational until the new submarines are ready in the mid 2030s.
“One of the biggest hurdles for the Canadian Navy—and the military at large—is keeping our ships, submarines and hardware operational for long periods,” explained Cameron Munro, defense scientist with Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) at Halifax’s Atlantic Research Centre. “In Canada, we tend to use things beyond their original design life—40 or even 50 years.”
It goes without saying that using equipment for several decades involves a tremendous amount of maintenance and repair. On top of that, MRO processes can be further complicated by the fact that OEMs go out of business, making it challenging to source replacement parts or the proper tooling to make those parts. This has meant that the Royal Canadian Navy has had to work with tool-and-die foundries that make custom parts from scratch, a process that is both expensive and incredibly time consuming. “This kind of procurement can take years,” he added. “And that’s not always an option when readiness is the priority.”
That’s where Dalhousie University’s engineering department comes in. With its expertise in metals and its AM resources, an engineering team led by materials engineer Dr. Paul Bishop will leverage metal additive manufacturing to develop critical submarine replacement parts on demand. Dr. Bishop is leading the initiative in collaboration with Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) with support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) as well as a consortium of industry partners.
A significant part of the work is focused on materials, with Dr. Bishop and his team studying specialized naval alloys to understand how to transform them into high-quality AM powder feedstock. “No one—at least in the open literature—has done serious research into how these highly specific naval alloys respond to additive manufacturing,” Dr. Bishop explained. “That’s the first fundamental piece of work we’re doing—determining which alloys can be printed and what the optimal manufacturing process looks like.”
The aim of the research is to alleviate the R&D burden on AM material manufacturers in Canada. According to Dalhousie, many of these companies are wary of taking on the research necessary for this type of application given the small-batch nature of the eventual production orders. Dr. Bishop hopes that by conducting the R&D at the university, and establishing material compositions as well as design and manufacturing specifications, it will facilitate the production of spare parts for submarines by these manufacturers.
He said: “Our role at Dalhousie is to develop the fundamental ‘recipes’—what materials work, how to print them and the processing parameters that yield products of a high metallurgical quality. Once we figure that out, companies take the research we develop in the lab and apply it at a larger, commercial scale.”
This approach will benefit the navy in several ways. For one, they will own the R&D necessary to produce parts, rather than depend on a single supplier with a proprietary system. For another, the Royal Canadian Navy can upgrade its maintenance and repair processes, transitioning to a more on-demand model rather than having to stockpile spare parts or wait years to replace obsolete components.
“The real goal is to provide the Navy and the supporting industry partners with data that define reliable processes that can be used at scale—passing the baton so to speak, so they can then work together to implement the outcomes in Canada,” Dr. Bishop concluded. The work being done at Dalhousie University will ultimately help to strengthen the national navy’s capacity to remain operational and self-reliant—a particularly important thing considering the changing landscape in the Canadian Arctic, where receding ice is leading to increased international trade and traffic.
