Home - America Makes Tackles AM Qualification Bottlenecks for Defense Defense America Makes Tackles AM Qualification Bottlenecks for Defense Paloma Duran 3 weeks ago 0 America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) have selected the winning teams for Delta Qual 2.0, a $9 million project call aimed at cutting the qualification barriers that slow additive manufacturing adoption across the U.S. defense industrial base. Three teams, led by ATI Materials , Trusted Metal , Auburn University , and The Barnes Global Advisors , will split the funding across three qualification-focused topic areas. The program is funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Manufacturing Technology Office (OSW ManTech) and targets three specific bottlenecks: excessive testing requirements, inconsistent machine installation standards, and rigid processing-parameter rules that make it hard to qualify AM parts for defense use. Three topics, four winning teams Topic 1, quantitative measurement-based installation qualification, drew two funded teams rather than one. ATI Materials leads a group that includes EOS North America , Phase3D , Laboratory Testing Inc ., Lockheed Martin , L3Harris Technologies , and Fluor Marine Propulsion . Trusted Metal leads a parallel team with Dyndrite , RTX Technology Research Center , the University of North Carolina at Charlotte , Oerlikon , and Velo3D . Both teams are building measurement and calibration procedures for LPBF subsystems aimed at cutting mechanical testing when a machine is moved, updated, serviced, or newly installed. Each team must run the work across at least three LPBF systems, including two of the same make and model, and put one machine through a software or hardware update to measure performance before and after. America Makes and NCDMM name winners of a $2M OSW ManTech project call. Photo via America Makes. Topic 2, bracketed qualification for laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), went to a team led by Auburn University, working alongside Texas A&M, Northrop Grumman , Eaton , Cumberland Additive , Nikon SLM , Prime Tech , 3Degrees , Ansys , Dyndrite, Oqton , NIST , the Air Force Research Laboratory , Naval Air Systems Command , RTX, and Battelle . “Bracketed” qualification means defining a validated processing window so a part can be produced within without triggering a full requalification each time a parameter shifts. For both Topic 1 and Topic 2, teams are restricted to materials with strong Department of War platform relevance and existing baseline property data, with the two most common already-qualified alloys, Ti6Al4V and AlSi10Mg, explicitly off-limits, pushing the work toward materials that still lack a qualification track record.