Home - Phase3D Wins Air Force Contract to Adapt Fringe Inspection to CMCs Defense Phase3D Wins Air Force Contract to Adapt Fringe Inspection to CMCs Aura Moreno 2 days ago 0 Chicago-based 3D printing quality assurance software developer Phase3D has received a contract award from the Department of the Air Force to extend its Fringe Inspection platform, a real-time, in-situ inspection system for metal additive manufacturing (AM), into ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). The Phase I effort will fund development work supporting propulsion, hypersonic, and thermal-protection programs across the Air Force’s advanced manufacturing enterprise. Turbine engines, hypersonic vehicles, and thermal-protection systems increasingly call for materials that outperform metal alloys on thermal resistance, strength-to-weight ratio, and oxidation resistance, and CMCs fit that profile. Adoption across Air Force sustainment and production has lagged anyway, largely because the non-destructive evaluation methods built for metals and polymer composites weren’t designed to catch what goes wrong in CMCs: matrix cracking, fiber pull-out, porosity, and delamination that can surface at any point in fabrication. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC)’s Propulsion Directorate and Rapid Sustainment Office , along with the Air Force Research Laboratory ’s (AFRL) Materials and Manufacturing Directorate , are named as the most immediate end users. All three are transitioning advanced materials into operational systems and need inspection tools deployable at depots, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) facilities, and research centers. Adapting a Metal AM Platform to Ceramics The underlying technology isn’t new. Phase3D built Fringe Inspection around structured-light scanning, which produces calibrated, repeatable surface heightmaps as a part is built, and has spent years proving the method out on metal AM with NASA , the U.S Navy , Air Force sustainment depots, and the AFRL. What changes under the new program is the material it’s pointed at. CMC fabrication introduces its own defect risks at nearly every stage, from tape fabrication and ply stacking through autoclave consolidation, pyrolysis, melt infiltration, and final machining. Phase3D will build out material-specific calibration routines, anomaly-classification models, and validation protocols so the system can flag surface deformation and defect signatures layer by layer, rather than waiting on 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 CEO of Phase3D. 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.