Project Number: S2855

Project Title: Automated Hull Access Welding and Cutting Applications

Period of Performance: DEC20 – OCT24

All Huntington Ingalls Industries – Ingalls Shipbuilding (Ingalls) programs require manual cutting and welding of temporary accesses (cut-out holes) along the exterior of the ship’s hull to allow for blasting, painting and ventilation. These manual efforts require the access areas to be dimensionally defined on site and cut and the material removed to open a temporary manhole. This manual labor is intensive and requires a highly skilled workforce to cut, remove and weld to re-install the access cut-out plate. Even with such skilled workers, the working environment lends itself to various scenarios that promote poor cut quality and weld inconsistency. These scenarios, in turn, have direct impact on the ability of the operator to produce first-time quality welds to close-out the access, as validated by ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation. Significant rework is performed by re-welding and repeated inspections to achieve acceptable quality requirements. This redundancy has impact upon productivity, schedule and cost for ship fabrication.
The objective of this Center for Naval Metalworking (CNM) project is to improve the productivity and increase the first-time quality acceptance for hull access cut- out processing by developing an automated or semi-automated solution. Market research was performed to help leverage solutions, including new commercial off- the-shelf technology, as well as other industrial users who work with similar processes amenable for shipyard use. Automated processes can produce consistent quality at generally higher speeds and for greater “duty cycles” than manual or semi-automatic processes. Thus, implementation will reduce rework by providing better first-time quality. This will aid in reducing the overall build time for the areas in which this project will be implemented.

Ingalls anticipates this effort will enable significant reductions in labor, rework and material handling, as well as an increase in throughput. Implementation of the automated / semi-automated processes for welding applications developed under this CNM project is estimated to result in savings of $452.0K per DDG hull or $1.1M for the combined platforms of DDG, LHA, LPD and NSC. This results in potential five-year savings of $2.3M for DDG or $5.8M for Ingalls’ combined platforms.

The project results will be implemented at Ingalls’ Pascagoula, MS, facility across the DDG, LHA, LPD and NSC platforms. Implementation is anticipated to occur in the second quarter of FY2025.