ATI Materials leads America Makes Delta Qual 2.0 team in $9M defense AM qualification call

ATI Materials leads one of two funded teams on Topic 1 of Delta Qual 2.0, a $9 million qualification project call from America Makes and NCDMM, funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War's Manufacturing Technology Office. The team, joined by EOS North America, Phase3D, Laboratory Testing Inc., Lockheed Martin, L3Harris Technologies, and Fluor Marine Propulsion, is building measurement and calibration procedures for LPBF subsystems to cut mechanical testing whenever a machine is moved, updated, serviced, or newly installed. Work spans at least three LPBF systems, including two of the same make and model, with a before-and-after performance check across a software or hardware update. A parallel Topic 1 team led by Trusted Metal, with Dyndrite, RTX Technology Research Center, UNC Charlotte, Oerlikon, and Velo3D, pursues the same installation-qualification problem.

The call targets a cost driver that decides whether defense primes can scale LPBF: a machine move, firmware update, or service event can trigger a full mechanical requalification under current practice. Two other topics were awarded in the same round. Auburn University leads a bracketed-qualification effort barred from the two most common already-qualified alloys, Ti-6Al-4V and AlSi10Mg, pushing the work toward materials without a qualification history, while Barnes Global Advisors leads a Red Team stress-testing the resulting standards. For ATI, a materials and powder supplier, leading installation-qualification work alongside EOS hardware and Phase3D melt-pool monitoring, with Lockheed Martin and L3Harris as end users, marks a step upstream into the qualification infrastructure that gates production adoption.

Readers tracking defense AM now have a sharper answer for what actually slows LPBF adoption: not machine throughput, but the cost of requalifying after routine service events, which this program aims to measure away. ATI Materials does not appear in the AM Pulse company index, so this qualification-infrastructure role is new information rather than a pattern extension; the coverage gap says nothing about the company's scale. What moves next is procedural: whether OEMs and depots adopt the resulting calibration protocol to skip full requalification after a machine swap, cutting sustainment turnaround for defense AM parts.