The following article appeared in the Pacific Daily News:
Plans to bring industrial scale 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, to Guam will serve Navy ship repair efforts while bringing new job opportunities to the region, according to panelists at last week’s Guam Defense Forum.
Discussion on 3D-printed manufacturing closed out discussion at the two-day forum hosted by the Office of the Governor at Dusit Thani Resort Guam.
“If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re building a factory here,” said Alex Benham, director of ASTRO America’s Guam Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Accelerator, GAMMA.
GAMMA is a partnership between ASTRO, the local government, University of Guam, Guam Community College, the Colorado School of Mines and the U.S. Navy.
“To put it in perspective, there’s not really any manufacturing here on Guam,” Benham said last Thursday. “There’s a lot of construction, cabinetry, all those kinds of things, but there’s no true manufacturing and skilled labor for that.”
Benham said a new factory and the broader industry that it can serve will bring a range of well-paying job opportunities, from machine operators to engineers working on new parts.
Those jobs can’t be sustained by flying people into the island, and will need locals to be trained up and put into the workforce pipeline, he said.
According to Benham, he’s already had two former Guam residents reach out to him with interest in the project.
The new industry will open up opportunities to expand training at the UOG School of Engineering, Dean Hiroshan Hettiarachchi said.
Hettiarachchi said the school is starting solely with a civil engineering program, which makes sense given the big construction demand on the island.
But there isn’t a demand for graduates in other fields, like mechanical engineering, he said.
“If you think about the economy of the island, we all know it’s not an industrialized island. We are a service type of an economic, tourism and military related,” Hettiarachchi said.
Students interested in mechanical engineering would have to take two years at UOG and then two years of schooling off-island, he said.
“The beauty of this program is the GAMMA initiative will provide us an opportunity to bring another player into the island to take care of the second two years,” he said.
He’s referring to the Colorado School of Mines.
“We have the platform. We have the students, too, because they are from the region. They are from the island, and when they work with Colorado School of Mines, the idea is to expose them to the latest technologies,” Hettiarachchi added.
‘Build capabilities’
The federal government is looking at 3D or additive manufacturing as a way to improve the economies and defense capabilities in the region, according to Benjamin Worrell, strategic advisor for the Office of the Secretary of War’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program.
“We have to build commerce in our island partners. We have to build it in our allied partners. We have to build capabilities that can be used by the U.S. government, but that only is about 20% of the use,” according to Worrell. “The rest of the use should be consumed by the local partners, consumables industry to make products.”
Worrell said additive manufacturing is “changing the game” in American industry.
He gave the prototype 3D-printing “expeditionary foundry” in Hawaii called The Forge as an example.
Worrell said The Forge had developed a pin for a machine that would have cost $500 at a cost of $1.63. Orders for that pin then went “outside the wire” for $75 a piece.
He said advanced manufacturing also offered a “changing paradigm” for how recycling is handled, with scrap material inexpensively turned into materials that could be used in the process.
Doyon Morato, director of strategic development for Singapore-based ship repair firm Maranda Defense Services Ltd., said her company is taking a risk building up on Guam.
“We’ve been working with ASTRO America on the additive manufacturing side because it’s just symbiotic with what we do,” Morato said. “It would help not only our business and our customers and our subcontractors, to get the job done and faster, quicker, cheaper, but it helps with our national security readiness and operational needs in this region.”
Morato said additive manufacturing is being used to develop safer parts for Navy ships and submarines.
But it could also be applied for parts in HVAC systems, automobiles, medical equipment, and other commercial areas, she said.
“It’s going to take a whole ecosystem of partnership between all of us here,” Morato added.