Maintenance Mindset: Meet the winners of the DOD's 2024 Maintenance Innovation Challenge

Welcome to Maintenance Mindset, our editors’ takes on things going on in the worlds of manufacturing and asset management that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site.

For this last Maintenance Mindset column of the year, I want to draw attention to a competition run by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS). 

The contest is the Maintenance Innovation Challenge, which has been run since 2020 (with a year off for COVID). The MIC competition is open to new innovations that include novel technologies, unique collaborative business relationships, resourcing strategies, business processes, and production processes that have the potential to make maintenance and sustainment more agile, effective, efficient, and affordable.

A panel of experts at NCMS narrowed the 2024 competition field of 77 entrants down to five fialists, and last week announced the two winners:

• The Overall Award winner is "Enhancing Field Repair Capabilities through Mixed Reality," for which the winning team developed a mixed reality headset tele-maintenance system (TMS) with digital work instructions to deliver expert coaching on equipment and tasks to technicians in the field. The TMS system enables quick access to depot and industry experts for faster fault diagnosis and repairs, and eliminates the need for depot Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to be on-site. 
• The People’s Choice Award winner, selected by audience members at the 2024 DOD Maintenance Symposium in Salt Lake City, UT, is "On-Aircraft Cold Spray to Optimize Maintenance & Reduce Logistics." This entry uses portable spray booths to enable the use of cold spray repair in the field, a solid-state coating deposition method in which powdered metals are accelerated through a nozzle to velocities sufficient to bond layers of new metal to worn surfaces. The benefits of using cold spray repair for on-aircraft maintenance in contested logistics scenarios include reduced downtime, increased aircraft availability, and improved safety.

You can click here to download a 96-page PDF booklet of all 2024 MIC entries, which include six entrants in the "Condition-Based Maintenance Plus" category, and twelve entrants in the "Coating and Corrosion Prevention" category. Given how many technologies filter their way from the military into the private sector, this is a great chance to learn about technologies that may someday benefit you and your plant. It's also a fascinating read...I'm only about 1/3 of the way through it, and will be reading the rest over the holiday break. 

I'd also like to give a shout-out to a technology application that was not part of this year's MIC competition but which did have a positive impact on the readiness of the U.S. PATRIOT missile defense system program. Earlier this year, Cintel senior data analyst Dave Aebisher spoke with Plant Services about his work applying motion amplification technology to improve the reliability of tactical power generators:

"Our reputation at Cintel is to take on very complex DoD problems and weapon systems, and we pride ourselves on having this broad tool set that we can apply to any problem," said Dave. "It’s tough to visualize without pictures here, but the rotor actually separates from its hub and moves out or rear-ward towards the back of the generator, and that causes a failure immediately too. We had one failure of that, and then the second failure I caught on MA as it was occurring, so we had a beautiful recording of what this looks like when the rotor is actually working its way out of that hub." 

The Maintenance Mindset team is taking two weeks off for the holidays, but we will be back on January 8 of next year with a new column. Thank you for reading, and see you in the new year!