America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) announced the winning teams on August 13 for Delta Qual 2.0, a $9 million project call aimed squarely at one of additive manufacturing's most persistent problems in defense work: qualification takes too long, costs too much, and doesn't scale. Four teams, addressing three distinct problem areas, will split the funding to attack the bottleneck from multiple angles.
If you've ever wondered why the Pentagon isn't printing parts on the same timeline a hobbyist prints a bracket, qualification is usually the answer. A part or a machine doesn't just need to work once — a defense program needs documented, repeatable proof that every part off every machine will perform to spec, under audit, for the life of the program. That process, inherited largely from traditional casting and forging workflows, was never built for a method where the machine, the powder, the software, and the operator can all shift the outcome of a print. Delta Qual 2.0 is the Office of the Under Secretary of War's Manufacturing Technology Office (OSW ManTech) betting that a smarter, more modular qualification framework can close that gap.
Four Teams, Three Problem Areas
According to America Makes' announcement, the project call targeted three distinct problem areas. Two of them drew a single winning team each; the third — installation qualification — drew two.
Quantitative measurement-based installation qualification drew two separate winning teams. One is led by ATI Materials, working alongside EOS North America, Phase3D, Laboratory Testing Inc. (LTI), Lockheed Martin, L3Harris Technologies, and Fluor Marine Propulsion. The other is led by Trusted Metal LLC, teamed with Dyndrite, the RTX Technology Research Center, UNC Charlotte, Oerlikon, and Velo3D. The problem both teams are chasing is straightforward in concept and brutal in practice: when a defense contractor installs a new laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) machine, does it need to re-run a full qualification campaign from scratch, or can a standardized protocol confirm the machine produces parts equivalent to a reference machine already on file? Fielding two independently led teams against the same problem gives OSW ManTech two shots at a protocol that has to hold up across different machine and partner ecosystems — and getting it right matters for a manufacturing base that needs to scale AM capacity across many facilities, not just prove out one "golden" printer in one lab.
Bracketed LPBF process qualification went to a team led by Auburn University, working with Texas A&M University, Northrop Grumman, Eaton, Cumberland Additive, Nikon SLM, and a long roster of additional partners including Dyndrite, Ansys, Oqton, NIST, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Air Systems Command, RTX, and Battelle. "Bracketed" qualification is a way of qualifying a process across a defined range of parameters rather than a single fixed recipe — instead of locking a part to one exact laser power, scan speed, and layer height, the qualification covers a validated window around those values. Done well, that gives contractors room to make small process adjustments — swapping a powder lot, tuning for a slightly different geometry — without triggering a full requalification every time. Done poorly, it's how a defect gets waved through.
Independent review — the project call's "Red Team" topic — went to The Barnes Global Advisors, working with SAE International, the American Welding Society (AWS), Battelle, universities including Colorado School of Mines and Johns Hopkins, and a wide roster of government and industry partners spanning NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the Army, the Navy submarine industrial base, the FAA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems. This is the audit layer — the mechanism by which a qualification package gets checked by a party that isn't the same organization that built the part or ran the process. SAE and AWS both already maintain standards infrastructure that spans traditional and additive manufacturing, so their presence signals this effort is meant to plug into existing standards bodies rather than invent a parallel review system from scratch.
Per the program's stated goals, Delta Qual 2.0 is meant to increase processing-parameter flexibility, streamline testing requirements, and strengthen machine-installation standards across the defense industrial base — the modernization push OSW ManTech says is needed to keep AM qualification from being the thing that caps how fast the defense manufacturing base can scale.
What It Means for Makers
None of this touches a desktop FDM printer directly, but the ripple effects matter for anyone tracking where AM investment and standards are heading. Qualification frameworks built for defense LPBF work tend to migrate outward over time — into aerospace supply chains, then into industrial and eventually consumer-adjacent standards bodies like SAE and AWS, both of which already publish specs referenced far outside the defense sector. A faster, more modular way to qualify a machine or a process also lowers the barrier for smaller manufacturers to get into defense-adjacent AM work, since today's qualification burden tends to favor large primes with the staff and budget to run lengthy campaigns. If bracketed process qualification and standardized machine installation checks become normal practice, mid-size metal AM shops — the kind that also sell services to non-defense customers — stand to benefit from lower compliance overhead across the board.
There's also a signal here about where AM software is headed. Phase3D (in-process melt pool and layer monitoring) and Dyndrite (build preparation and process control software) both landed on winning teams — Dyndrite on two of them — which tracks with a broader industry trend: qualification increasingly leans on real-time process data rather than purely post-build inspection. Expect that instrumentation to show up as a baseline expectation, not an optional upgrade, on metal AM systems marketed toward regulated industries.
A Leadership Refresh, Same Day
The Delta Qual 2.0 announcement landed alongside another piece of America Makes news: the organization also named its newly elected Executive Committee for 2026–2028 on August 13, according to a 3DPrint.com report rounding up the day's news. Government representatives on the incoming committee include Paul Gradl of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Laura Macht of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center, and Paul Witherell of NIST. Elected members draw from SME, Carnegie Mellon University, RTX, Beehive Industries, the Edison Welding Institute, Lockheed Martin, the National Institute for Aviation Research, and 3Degrees — several of the same organizations already embedded in the Delta Qual 2.0 teams. The overlap isn't surprising; America Makes' member base and its project-call participant pool have always drawn from the same relatively small circle of AM research institutions, primes, and machine builders.
