America Makes and its managing organization, the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), have put $12.4 million behind two project teams tasked with proving metal 3D-printed parts can replace legacy alloys in Department of Defense weapon systems without a case-by-case qualification fight every time.
The program is called MIAMI, the Maturation Initiative for Additive Metals Interchangeability. Northrop Grumman Corporation leads one team, working with Georgia Institute of Technology and Contextualize, LLC. Fastech, LLC leads the second, with a longer partner list: Pacific Engineering, Auburn University and its National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence, Texas A&M University, Prime Tech Data Management, AML3D, and Westmoreland Mechanical Testing & Research.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Total funding | $12.4 million |
| Project leads | Northrop Grumman, Fastech |
| Northrop Grumman partners | Georgia Tech, Contextualize |
| Fastech partners | 6 named organizations |
The work itself is unglamorous but the bottleneck it targets is real: each defense program currently tends to qualify its own AM material data for its own parts, which means the same alloy substitution gets re-proven over and over across different primes and platforms. MIAMI’s teams will pick candidate parts, set performance requirements, and generate data showing an AM material met or beat the legacy alloy’s critical properties, with the explicit goal of making that data shareable across programs rather than locked to one contractor.
America Makes frames the payoff as cutting redundant testing and shortening qualification timelines across what it calls the defense industrial base, including what the announcement refers to as the organic industrial base, the government-owned depots and arsenals that also build and repair these parts. Neither the award split between the two teams nor a project timeline or completion date has been published.