America Makes Awards $6M to Four Teams for Refractory Metal 3D Printing

The Problem With High-Temperature Metal Printing

Refractory alloys can withstand the extreme temperatures that defense applications demand. Getting them into production through additive manufacturing has been a different problem. Material property data is incomplete, process variability remains high, and supply chains are fragile. The Air Force Research Laboratory wants to close those gaps, and it just funded four teams to do it.

Who Is Getting the Money

America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining awarded $6 million under the PADAM 2.0 program. The funding splits across three topics. Topic 1, focused on existing refractory alloy systems, received up to $2 million per award. Lockheed Martin leads one team with Quadrus Corporation, Colorado School of Mines, and 3Degrees. HRL Laboratories leads the second team alongside Boeing, Amaero, Alloyed, and Texas A&M University.

ATI Materials took the single Topic 2 award, up to $1.7 million, targeting novel or emerging alloy systems. Its team includes Boeing and the University of Dayton Research Institute. Topic 3 received the remaining $300,000. Colorado School of Mines is working alone on a supply chain assessment that tracks material from raw mineral extraction to a qualified finished part.

Why This Matters

Boeing appears on two teams without leading either, which signals how broadly these programs touch the defense supply chain. The program is not about inventing new alloys from scratch. It is about moving existing materials through qualification and into production at scale. That is the bottleneck. The metals exist. The data and repeatable processes do not, and that is what this funding targets.