A $5.5m America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) project call will develop material allowables for a high-strength, 7075-T73-equivalent aluminium alloy across three classes of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing (AM) systems.
The Generation Of Technical-data for High-strength Aluminium Alloy Material (GOTHAAM) project is being funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Manufacturing Technology Office (OSW ManTech).
Its objective is to enable scalable production on small, medium, and large-format printers. By delivering a corrosion-resistant, aerospace-grade alloy with broad defence and commercial applications, GOTHAAM will develop ways to generate a strong return on investment for original equipment manufacturers and the organic industrial base as it transitions into qualified production.
“Qualifying advanced AM materials to deliver robust material data supporting durable, corrosion-resistant components for critical defence applications directly strengthens the defence industrial base,” said John Martin, Additive Manufacturing Research Director at America Makes. “By delivering validated data and maturing LPBF capability, we’re giving U.S. manufacturers what they need to produce reliable components for critical defence systems.”
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems will lead the GOTHAAM project call, with the following list of contributing partners.
- Lockheed Martin
- Northrop Grumman
- Airbus Space & Defense + АР Works
- MIMO Technik
- Quadrus Corporation
- Hadrian Additive
- Nikon AM
- EOS America
- Valimet
- Toyal America
- Equispheres
- AMG Aluminum
- Rio Tinto
- Sunrise Metals
- Nio Corp.
- Dyndrite
- Scot Forge
A Dyndrite press release distributed in accordance with the GOTHAAM project call confirms that the company's SASSQUATCH methodology will be used to accelerate process harmonisation across multiple LPBF platforms.
SASSQUATCH will provide software control over critical manufacturing variables, including laser assignment, toolpath zoning, stitching zones, gas-flow considerations, laser power, scan speed and Z-height. The company says the program will show that controlling these variables will increase process consistency across different printers, generating equivalency datasets required for qualification.
“Qualification remains one of the significant barriers preventing metal additive manufacturing from scaling into true production,” said Harshil Goel, Founder and CEO of Dyndrite. “Today, changing a machine, site, parameter set or process configuration can mean repeating enormous amounts of qualification work. GOTHAAM gives this team an opportunity to demonstrate a different approach: explicitly control the manufacturing process, understand the meaningful deltas between systems, and determine what actually needs to be requalified, all through software.”
