The National Center for Defense of Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) and America Makes have announced a new directed project call funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) worth a total of $3.2M.
The objective of the “Demonstration of Novel Methods for Effective AM Process Qualification/Re-Qualification – Delta Qualification (Delta Qual)” project call is to establish a qualified AM process, rapidly and affordably, allowing for changes in key AM process, post-processing, and/or material feedstock variables while efficiently validating a qualified AM material through statistical analysis.
Qualification of AM machines and materials is a major barrier to the broad adoption of AM. Generating the requisite data and models requires substantial resources to produce statistically significant data and perform testing and analysis of the resulting data. This greatly inhibits the agility of the AM processes to respond to changes in the technology or the supply chain base, requiring a total requalification that can be extremely costly and time-consuming.