America Makes, and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), have announced EWI as the winner of a $13.2M project call focused on additive manufacturing (AM) quality assurance.
The project, known as the INtegrated System for In-situ Testing & Evaluation (INSITE), is funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Manufacturing Technology Office (OSW ManTech). It aims to establish an integrated AM quality assurance system that unifies in-situ monitoring and post-build inspection, strengthening defect detection and advancing Department of War (DoW) priorities for more reliable AM qualification. The program’s goal is to deliver production-ready capabilities that enhance efficiency, readiness, and competitiveness across the U.S. supply base, addressing a long-standing certification bottleneck that has slowed AM adoption in defense manufacturing.
Combining In-Situ Monitoring with Post-Build Inspection
The combined in-situ and post-build nondestructive evaluation (NDE) approach targets some of AM’s most challenging parts to assess, including large components, dense materials, and complex geometries that are difficult to evaluate using traditional methods. By pairing real-time production monitoring with accelerated post-build inspection and expert oversight, the approach seeks to strengthen quality assurance, support certification, and expand manufacturing capabilities for critical components.
Rather than advancing individual sensing or NDE technologies in isolation, the program is focused on developing and demonstrating a single integrated quality assurance system within a certifiable framework.
“As additive manufacturing advances toward larger, more complex applications, the ability to reliably verify part quality is becoming increasingly critical,” said Ben DiMarco, Technology Transition Director at America Makes. DiMarco added that the initiative aims to strengthen confidence in AM technologies and accelerate their adoption across the defense industrial base, and commended the winning team for its work on the project.
EWI’s project team includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing Company, GKN Aerospace GTC, LLC, Norsk Titanium, Addiguru, FormAlloy, TRI Austin, and Computational Tools.
In-Situ Monitoring as a Path Around AM’s Qualification Barrier
The gap INSITE addresses is unreliable quality assurance tools for certifying AM parts, specifically parts too large, dense, or geometrically complex for traditional inspection methods to assess.
Phase3D’s Fringe Inspection kit for Colibrium Additive’s M2 Series 5 platform, from Phase3D, addresses a narrower slice of that barrier: the company states that qualification remains one of the toughest obstacles to scaling AM in aerospace and defense, and positions in-situ monitoring as necessary for meeting quality requirements without slowing production.
That’s consistent with INSITE’s premise that in-situ monitoring is a necessary piece of the qualification puzzle. Phase3D’s kit, however, is a single-platform commercial product rather than a system unifying in-situ and post-build inspection into one certifiable framework, showing how the in-situ half of that equation is already being commercialized on its own while INSITE works toward combining both halves.
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Featured image via America Makes and NCDMM logo. Image via America Makes.
