VACCO Industries delivers LPBF-printed Cu-Ni pressure regulating valve for US Navy submarine fleet sustainment

VACCO Industries has delivered a copper-nickel pressure regulating valve body manufactured via laser powder bed fusion to support the US Navy's submarine fleet sustainment program. Penn United Technologies printed the Cu-Ni valve body using LPBF, then handed it to VACCO for final assembly, non-destructive testing, and production-level validation. The work was funded by the Submarine Industrial Base through the Maritime Sustainment Technology and Innovation Consortium, an Other Transaction Authority program run in coordination with Naval Sea Systems Command. The valve has cleared testing and is approved for installation aboard a submarine.

The delivery splits the specialty-valve OEM from the print step, with VACCO owning design, assembly, and qualification while Penn United supplies the LPBF production, a division of labor typical of how metal AM parts reach defense sustainment programs through qualified service bureaus rather than in-house print fleets. Submarine sustainment is fundamentally a spare-parts problem: legacy Cu-Ni valve bodies carry long lead times and thin domestic sourcing, so the value here is reproducing an out-of-production geometry on demand rather than cutting unit cost. NAVSEA's involvement through MSTIC points to a repeatable qualification pathway for AM hardware across the fleet rather than an isolated pilot print. Parts like this rarely make headlines once qualified, even as they become standard fleet infrastructure.