India’s defense budget for the the fiscal year 2015-16 is around 2.29 trillion rupees or $40.07 billion, most of this money is used to procure arms and ammunitions from foreign countries like America, Israel, Russia and France. The complete dependency on these countries for arms, severely hampers the Indian capability to defend itself. Although Indians have successfully developed an indigenous Ballistic missile defense system, they are still to make an indigenous Fighter aircraft to defends it airspace, hence it has to import them from the countries mentioned above. These Aircrafts don’t come cheap, are extremely difficult to procure, and like all machines even the Aircrafts under go wear and tear they needs to be regularly overhauled to be service ready. Dependence on the origin country of these Fighter jets for spares and technical know how to repair them can be time consuming and lethally fatal in the times of an actual war.

Recently the situation became serious as Pakistan received highly advanced F16’s Fighter Jets from the American’s as a part of Fight Against Terror Campaign. To counter the threat posed by these advance jets the Indian Air force recently signed a deal with France to get 36 Rafale fighter jets in fly-away condition in a “time bound manner”,  the deal set Indians back by $6 billion Us Dollars. Another Initiative taken up by the Indian Government to safeguard its interest was to upgrade their aging fleet of Mirage Fighter Jets purchased from France. In 2006 it was reported that the IAF was close to finalizing a EUR 1.5 billion (about $2 billion USD) deal to upgrade its fleet of 51 Mirage 2000 ‘Vajra’ fighter jets.

Along with these steps, the Indian Government has also asked Indian National Aerospace Laboratories to re-engineer Fighter jets at their disposal In order to upgrade them. National Aerospace Laboratories which is a government organization founded in 1959, has a track record of developing indigenous light trainer aircraft like the HANSA, and SARAS which is a multirole light transport aircraft.

In order to achieve this the National Aerospace Laboratories floated a tender to procure new 3d printers to make prototype models of spares and study its feasibility of use as replacement parts for the  the Fighter Jets. It is note worthy that they already had a few Stratasys 3d printers with them however the running cost of these machines were pretty high due to proprietary raw material it used. The Tender was won by a local company called J Group Robotics which supplied them with a Dimension Delta X, an all metal Dual nozzle FDM 3d printer with a build base of 420MM x 720 MM x 420MM.

 Dimension Delta X, can print at 50 micron resolution with materials like ABS, PLA, Nylon, PVA, PP, TGlass, Wood, Stone, Carbon Fiber and HIPS. According to National Aerospace Laboratories the raw material used for this machine was available for as low as $30 which is like 2000 Indian Rupees, where as their old Stratasys machine used raw material which was worth 13 thousand INR per roll. This Indian Delta printer was also cheaper as it was available at 1/10 of the cost of the Stratasys printer.

The scientist at the National Aerospace Laboratories were extremely happy with the Print quality hand already started wind tunnel testing of the Landing gears made using the Dimension Delta X 3d printer. One scientist we met informed us that they would have saved a lot of money if they decided to purchase the Delta x printer earlier as they have already spent as much as 26 hundred thousand Rupees just on the raw material for their Stratasys 3d printer.

Source: http://www.smartprinting.co/3d-printing-news/