62 Show report | Xponential 2024 military system for mine neutralisation, but if anybody is producing other payloads with an application for a smaller USV, we would love to talk to you and hear your ideas,” Sujecki adds. Apex Space & Defense Systems discussed how to scale up production of UAVs to meet growing military demand in the shadow of demonstrably massive Chinese and Russian industrial capacity. The company is looking for new and improved composite materials that will support fast, high-volume manufacturing while meeting quality and performance standards. A major supplier of composite structures for a wide range of military platforms, Apex focuses on the manufacture of fuselage, wing and control surface parts for aircraft from pre-preg composite materials with another division that makes filamentwound parts. “Our customers come to us when they’re in the infancy of a design programme, and we help them to find materials and design their products for manufacturability,” says Apex CEO Tracy Glende. The drive for larger numbers of UAVs has created an urgent need to reduce manufacturing times and this has consequently brought advanced materials such as snap-cure resins to the fore. “We’re paired with material suppliers, and are testing and validating their snapcure resin systems, along with some other new lightweight foam materials,” says Tom Millspaugh, director of new product development. “Where normally you’d have a two- to three-hour cure, these cure in 10-20 minutes and offer basically the same properties as a long-cure system. And the suppliers are doing a pretty good job of toughening the resin systems,” he adds. “We’re looking at them to increase production from, say, 10 UAV component sets a day to 100.” Apex is also seeking better lightweight foams used to stiffen structures by keeping wing skins apart. “A lot of the manufacturers have gone to commercial insulation foams because they are cheap and readily available. The issue with them is that they are uncontrolled; they are not mil-spec foams that they have to qualify every time they change blowing agents,” he explains. Today, he says, the gap in performance, consistency and price between the qualified aerospace-grade foams and the commercial ones is getting smaller. “Now, they are specifically engineering and formulating these foams to have the right properties.” Austal USA showcased its capabilities in integrating autonomous control systems into large naval vessels. The company has several different autonomous vessels, either recently delivered or under construction, including the commercial crew supply boats of the US Navy’s ‘ghost fleet’ that were converted to uncrewed operations under Project Overlord, along with units of the Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport (T-EPF) fleet. “We got into autonomy not through shipbuilding but through our machinery control systems,” says Anton Schmieman, the shipbuilder’s director of advanced concepts. “When the Navy came out with their requirements for Project Overlord, we recognised that the systems we developed originally for commercial, high-speed vessels met around 92-94% of the requirements that the Navy had.” Austal USA teamed up with L3Harris to convert the first and fourth units of the Overlord USV (OUSV) fleet, integrating L3Harris’ navigational autonomy with its own machinery control technology. Austal USA’s highly automated hull, mechanical and electrical systems controls were already integrated into the Spearhead class T-EPF ships as standard when the company won the contract to convert USNS Apalachicola (T-EPF August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology USNS Apalachicola, the US Navy’s largest ship with autonomous capabilities, uses a combination of L3 Harris’ navigational autonomy and Austal’s machinery control tech (Image courtesy of Austal)
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