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24 Mar 14. The U.S Navy christened its newest Independence-variant Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the future USS Jackson (LCS 6), at the Austal shipyard in Mobile, Ala., on March 22, 2014. As systems integrator on the Austal USA-led team, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems is continuing to apply its proven open architecture and open business model approach to the LCS program. General Dynamics’ open architecture computing infrastructure, OPEN CI, serves as the technology backbone for the ship’s core mission system and provides the Navy with unprecedented flexibility to rapidly and affordably address mission-critical needs.
“Our open architecture computing infrastructure ensures commonality in the ship’s interfaces, allowing for the rapid upgrading and swapping of mission capabilities to enhance performance where and when it’s needed most,” said Carlo Zaffanella, vice president and general manager of Integrated Platform Solutions at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. “With OPEN CI, we are helping the Navy drive time and cost out, and innovation and capability in.”
LCS 6, the third Independence-variant ship to be built for the Navy, includes a significant number of core mission system improvements that are the direct result of the lessons learned and the rapid evolution of technology from the LCS 2 and LCS 4 design to the current version. Applying its open architecture approach to the Independence-variant ships, General Dynamics has made it possible to increase system capability, address obsolescence and maintain compatibility with the ship’s many subsystems, while substantially lowering the cost ship-over-ship.
24 Mar 14. Arevo Labs, a Silicon Valley startup, announced the availability of technology and materials to create Ultra Strong High Performance Polymer parts using a 3D printing process. Supported materials include High Performance Polymers such as KetaSpire® PEEK, AvaSpire® PAEK, Radel® PPSU and PrimoSpire® SRP. Arevo’s offering consists of Proprietary Carbon Fiber and Carbon Nanotube (CNT) Reinforced High Performance Materials, printing technology compatible with commercially available filament fusion 3D Printers and specialized software algorithms to create 3D objects with deterministic mechanical properties. 3D Printing with PEEK and other advanced reinforced polymers has been technically challenging until now. Arevo Labs’ team has solved this problem by optimizing polymer formulations along with innovative extrusion technology to make them suitable for additive manufacturing. Arevo Labs patent pending 3D Printing technology combines the benefits of printing complex geometries with reinforced materials that have excellent resistance to high temperatures and chemicals. The 3D printed parts optimized for mechanical properties using Arevo’s advanced algorithms result in lighter stronger parts with unmatched mechanical properties. (Source: Yahoo!/BUSINESS WIRE)
27 Mar 14. As part of the Defense Department’s science and technology community, the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is to change what’s possible, the DARPA director said yesterday.
DARPA makes pivotal early investments that allow the department to “take big steps forward in our national security capabilities,” Arati Prabhakar told members of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities. “That mission has not changed over our five-and-a-half decade history as an agency,” she said, “but of course the world that we’re living in has changed in that period.” Today, the nation faces a wide variety of national security threats ranging from the actions of rogue nation-states to networked terrorism, Prabhakar said. All of those actors have access to very powerful technologies, she noted. The growing cost of operational military systems