EWI's Navy Joining Center receives award

Columbus, Ohio-based EWI announced today that its Navy Joining Center (NJC) has received the Defense Manufacturing Technology Achievement Award. This annual award is given to project teams from the government and/or private sector most responsible for a specific innovative manufacturing technology achievement.

NJC received the award for leading a project that addressed a design challenge using composite-to-steel adhesive joints for the DD(X), the U.S. Navy's next generation multi-role surface combatant. Project team members included participants from industry, academia, and other Navy centers.

"This ManTech project has developed innovative, cost-effective adhesive joining technology for the DD(X)," said Larry Brown, project manager for NJC. "The adhesive bonded joint has been demonstrated to be 40 percent lighter and 50 percent less expensive to produce than the existing bolted joint configuration and also improves the ship signature and requires less in-service maintenance."

Preparations are underway for implementation of the technology by several Navy shipbuilders. Bath Iron Works and Northrop Grumman Ship Systems have been active team members and participants in all aspects of the project since its inception. To ensure that manufacturability and implementation were fully within the capability of manufacturing personnel, full scale test articles were built at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems under normal operating conditions.

In addition to EWI, the project team included Bath Iron Works, Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, the Composites Manufacturing Technology Center of Excellence (South Carolina Research Authority), Penn State University Applied Research Lab, Boeing, and Naval Surface Warfare Center-Carderock.

Details on projects and prior year recipients and nominees are available here.