America Makes Names Winners of $9M Defense AM Qualification Push

The qualification problem

The Defense Department knows metal additive manufacturing can produce strong, complex parts. What it does not know is whether those parts will stay strong when a machine parameter shifts, a software version updates, or a new operator runs the same program on a different build plate.

That uncertainty is why America Makes, the national additive manufacturing innovation institute, keeps funding qualification research instead of buying more printers. Hardware has outpaced the paperwork. A part can print in hours. Proving it meets defense-grade standards and reproving it every time something changes still takes months of physical testing.

Delta Qual 2.0 winners

This week America Makes announced the winners of its $9 million Delta Qual 2.0 program. Three teams will share the money, each attacking a different slice of the qualification bottleneck.

The largest awards go to two teams working on Topic 1, which targets bracket-style qualification for laser powder bed fusion. A team led by Auburn University, joined by Texas A&M, Northrop Grumman, Eaton, Cumberland Additive, Nikon SLM Solutions, Prime Tech, 3Degrees, Ansys, Dyndrite, Oqton, NIST, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Air Systems Command, RTX, and Battelle, will receive up to $2.7 million. A second Topic 1 team also gets up to $2.7 million.

Topic 2, focused on a single LPBF qualification approach, went to a team led by the same Auburn coalition, with up to $2.7 million.

Both topics restrict work to materials that lack existing qualification track records. The two most common military alloys, Ti6Al4V and AlSi10Mg, are explicitly off-limits. That pushes the research toward materials the services actually want to use but cannot yet trust at scale.

The third award, up to $900,000, went to The Barnes Global Advisors for a Red Team role. Rather than running its own qualification tests, Barnes will advise the technical teams, review their progress every four months, and work with standards bodies to turn lessons learned into draft AM standards language. Its roster includes SAE International, the American Welding Society, ASTM International, Battelle, the University of Texas at El Paso, Colorado School of Mines, Johns Hopkins University, NIST, Elementus Additive, Nikon AM, SME, VulcanForms, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Parker Hannifin, the Army DEVCOM Aviation and Missile Center, NASA Marshall, the Navy Submarine Industrial Base, the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, and the FAA.

Why bracket qualification matters

Bracket qualification means defining a validated processing window. If a part prints within that window, it does not require a full requalification every time a parameter shifts slightly. The goal is to replace the current test-every-change model with a trusted range.

The program also requires cost-sharing: Topics 1 and 2 teams must match 50 percent of the award. Topic 3, the Red Team, has no cost-share requirement.

Parallel efforts

America Makes is not the only group chasing this problem. In June 2026 it awarded Dyndrite $2 million for AIM-4AM, a project that applies machine learning to process-structure-property relationships, aiming to reduce redundant physical testing. In April 2026, Naval Air Systems Command awarded Colibrium Additive a contract specifically to accelerate testing, qualification, and certification of metal 3D printed parts for military aviation.

All three efforts share the same premise: faster printing is no longer the constraint. Faster qualification is.