NASA Marshall Tests Born Qualified Metal 3D Printing With Phase3D

Qualifying Parts While They Print

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center awarded Phase3D a role in a new program aimed at proving that metal additively manufactured parts can be qualified for spaceflight during production. The program will generate more than 50,000 individually inspected build layers on a production-scale EOS M300-4, a quad-laser system that aerospace and defense contractors are increasingly installing for production work.

The central question is whether a continuous measurement record, assembled from thousands of layer-by-layer readings taken during the build, can reliably correlate with the results of post-build CT scanning. If the correlation holds at scale, manufacturers could define quantitative go/no-go thresholds that support qualification decisions in real time. That is the core of what NASA calls born qualified manufacturing.

What the System Catches

Phase3D's Fringe Inspection is designed to catch process disturbances that currently remain invisible until post-build testing. The system measures powder spreading irregularities, recoater blade interactions, layer shifts, melt pool abnormalities, spatter accumulation, delamination, and unexpected surface height variation. Because those measurements are captured at every layer, engineers can see when and where a deviation occurred, not just that one exists somewhere in the finished part.

A Track Record to Build On

Previous collaborative research between Phase3D and NASA Marshall already demonstrated correlation between Fringe Inspection measurements and CT-detected porosity. Separate studies with the US Air Force Research Laboratory showed close agreement between layer-wise anomalies flagged during production and defects identified in post-build analysis.

The Air Force tests showed 81% of in-situ anomalies correlating to CT-detected defects, with depressions larger than 47 µm. The NASA tests showed 83% correlation, with 100% for depressions larger than 42 µm. Those results were generated with test geometries, not on a quad-laser production system printing flight-representative brackets. The 50,000-layer dataset is designed to answer whether those correlations hold at production scale.

The Standards Behind the Effort

The work aligns with NASA Civil Space Shortfalls 1490 through 1494, covering in-situ monitoring, process qualification, and qualification of complex additive manufactured geometries. It also maps to established aerospace qualification standards including NASA-STD-6030, NASA-STD-6033, and SAE AMS7032, which define requirements for qualifying metal AM components and processes for flight applications.

If the program delivers on its promise, it could shorten the qualification timeline for metal AM parts from months of post-build testing to a real-time decision made on the shop floor. That is a meaningful shift for aerospace suppliers waiting on certification before they can ship flight hardware.