Award

Welding plays a crucial role in Navy and ship construction, enabling the creation of strong, watertight, and durable structures. It's used in a wide variety of applications, from welding the hull to attaching interior components. Heaters, specifically for preheat and post-weld heat treatment (PWHT), are crucial during ship welding to ensure structural integrity and prevent cracking. Preheating raises the base metal temperature before welding, slowing the cooling rate and reducing hydrogen embrittlement and cracking. Post-weld heat treatment further helps mitigate cracking and improves the weld's strength and ductility. Historically, heater bars could be repaired but recently the devices have changed from repairable tools to consumable products which are no longer durable or reliable, have an unpredictable operating life and have long lead times resulting in critical operations being forced to stop and wait for equipment to become free to continue the process, leading to delays throughout the entire shipbuilding process. As there is an urgent need for innovation in pre and post weld heating technology, Triton proposes to design, develop, transition and commercialize a novel additive manufacturing approach to manufacture electrical resistive heater bars with integrated temperature sensing, feedback control of heating rate, and temperature data logging.