Home / Industrial Additive Manufacturing / Defense / Phase3D wins USAF contract to extend AM inspection tech Aerospace AM Defense Phase3D wins USAF contract to extend AM inspection tech Award funds a feasibility study applying Phase3D's Fringe Inspection platform to ceramic composites Joseph Caron-Dawe August 20, 2026 1 minute read Stay up to date with everything that is happening in the wonderful world of AM via our LinkedIn community. Phase3D has received a contract from the Department of the Air Force to extend its Fringe Inspection platform, a real-time, in-situ inspection system for metal additive manufacturing , to ceramic matrix composites, a materials class central to propulsion, hypersonic and thermal-protection systems. The Phase I award funds development of CMC-specific calibration routines and defect-detection models for a platform already used across aerospace, defense and industrial AM programs. Conventional non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods, developed largely for metals and polymer composites, cannot reliably detect the matrix cracking, fiber pull-out, porosity and delamination that can occur throughout CMC fabrication. Fringe Inspection uses structured-light scanning to produce calibrated surface heightmaps during production, a method Phase3D has validated on metal AM with NASA, the Navy and Air Force sustainment depots. The company will apply that approach to CMC manufacturing, where defects can occur at nearly every stage, from tape fabrication and ply stacking through autoclave consolidation, pyrolysis, melt infiltration and machining, with the goal of flagging defects as parts are built rather than through post-process CT scanning or destructive sectioning. “Fringe Inspection was built to answer one question in real time: is the part you are building the part you designed?” said Dr. Niall O’Dowd, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Phase3D. “We’ve spent years proving that out on metal parts for NASA, the Air Force, and leading aerospace primes. This program lets us ask the same question of a completely different material system, one the Air Force is counting on for the next generation of propulsion and thermal protection, and where the cost of finding a defect after the part is finished is even higher than it is in metal.” “Ceramic matrix composites are notoriously hard to qualify because so much can go wrong across so many stages, from tape fabrication all the way through infiltration and final machining,” said Andrew Holliday, Applications Engineering Manager at Phase3D. “The industry has been trying to solve that with post-process CT scans and destructive testing, the same approach that used to hold back metal additive manufacturing. Real-time, layer-by-layer visibility is exactly what this material needs, and it is exactly what Fringe Inspection already does.” Tags future Joseph Caron-Dawe August 20, 2026 1 minute read