The United States Navy is expanding its presence in Danville.
An existing Navy pilot program focuses on developing a new workforce for shipbuilding at Danville’s Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. That program is called Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing. (See our previous story, “How Danville has become a center for shipbuilding trades.”)
Every four months, it graduates a new cohort of students in disciplines like additive manufacturing, CNC machining, quality control inspection (also called metrology), and welding. These are crucial skills for the defense industrial base.
And now, the Navy is officially locating on IALR’s campus with the launch of the Navy Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence. This facility will work alongside the workforce development already happening there.
Additive manufacturing is the process of creating something by building onto it. It is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing, which cuts away at a solid block of material to form an object.
The ribbon-cutting for this center was today in Danville during the second ATDM summit hosted by the IALR.
The Center of Excellence will provide sustainable and scalable production in the submarine industrial base and develop processes and technologies for additive manufacturing.
Once these processes and technologies are developed, you need people who know how to work the technology, said Rachel Spencer, vice president of strategic communications at AccessU, a Roanoke-based marketing and advertising firm that helped coordinate the event.
That’s where ATDM comes in.
Basically, ATDM creates the workforce, and the Center of Excellence creates the processes to deliver to additive manufacturers (and companies that are looking to get into additive manufacturing).
“They go hand-in-hand,” Spencer said. “One is on the workforce side and one is on the manufacturers’ side, and they play together.”
The Center of Excellence “will help drive additive manufacturing capacity to a scale that will significantly impact submarine industrial base capacity,” according to information from IALR.
And this is crucial, because one of the “biggest risks for the industrial base” is a dwindling workforce, said Navy Rear Admiral Scott Pappano in an interview after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Manufacturing in America has “atrophied,” Pappano said, adding that the country’s manufacturing workforce has declined in recent years.
But the Center of Excellence, with ATDM, is expected to bring 800 to 1,000 students annually, once it reaches full operation in 2024.
It will be housed in the State of Virginia’s Center for Manufacturing Advancement on IALR’s campus, a $28.8-million, 51,250-square-foot building that opened today. The Navy is its first tenant. (See our previous story, “Danville’s Center for Manufacturing Advancement to open today.”)
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