NCMS Project #: 142250
Problem: The military confronts many challenges while attempting to maintain and sustain critical components of legacy vehicles that are 30 to 40 years old. Many of the defense industry original equipment manufacturers are no longer in business and proprietary technical data packages are not available or affordable for the government to purchase, which makes sustaining these legacy vehicles even more challenging. Furthermore, the need to incorporate advanced vehicle electronics in combat vehicle platforms imposes a need to consider additional power generation requirements on legacy and future platforms.
Benefit: The completion of project tasks will serve as a road map for commercial industry to assess and evaluate how advanced engineering principles, tools, and processes can be applied across a product life cycle to redesign critical components and integrate them into a full vehicle system design to improve reliability and maintainability.
Solution/Approach: This initiative will leverage advanced commercial digital engineering principles, tools, processes, and best practices to develop and demonstrate the redesign of critical vehicle components and how best to integrate them into the vehicle design to improve system reliability and maintainability. A comprehensive analysis and assessment will identify changes to current critical components and recommend options to streamline prototype development, qualification and testing, and full system integration across the fleet of Abrams Main Battle Tanks.
Impact on Warfighter:
- Enhance vehicle reliability and maintainability
- Reduce vehicle repair time and maintenance issues
- Increase vehicle and warfighter readiness
- Decrease maintenance and sustainment costs
DOD Participation:
- Project Director Main Battle Tank System
- Product Manager Abrams Main Battle Tanks
Industry Participation:
- LOC Performance
- NCMS
Benefit Area(s):
- Cost savings
- Mx avoidance & reliability
- Safety
- Mx management improvement
- Durability
- Reliability improvement
Mx Focus Area:
- Reliability Improvement (Hardware)
