America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) are proud to announce that the University of Dayton Research Institute has been selected as the awardee of a recent project call funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate (AFRL(RXN)), totaling $450K. The project call, Affordable and Agile Composite Additive Manufactured Structures (AACAMS), will develop a comprehensive set of roadmaps and reports to inform future Department of Defense (DoD) and industry investment needed to fully mature and scale continuous fiber additive manufacturing (CFAM) technologies. The effort will assess the current CFAM landscape, identify technology gaps limiting adoption, and define attributes required by system integrators to enable the successful deployment of CFAM in defense and commercial products. One award was anticipated under this project call.
As global competition intensifies, rapidly producing components for critical weapons and support platforms at affordable mass is imperative. The DoD has prioritized CFAM for its ability to produce robust, lightweight parts by combining plastics with long fibers such as carbon or fiberglass, delivering high performance. Fully matured, CFAM unlocks a highly flexible and adaptable fabrication process that can quickly shift production between different part types as the design cycle accelerates from concept to fielding. For this roadmap study, CFAM includes any process capable of depositing an unbroken fiber and polymer matrix into a 3D part, such as layer-by-layer deposition, deposition onto a 3D surface, or freeform fabrication.