America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) are proud to announce a new open project call funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War, Acquisition and Sustainment, Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) Program, worth a total of $12.4M. The project call, Maturation Initiatives for Additive Metals Interchangeability (MIAMI), aims to validate that metallic additive manufacturing (AM) materials can reliably replace traditional alloys in Department of War (DoW) weapon system components. Three awards are anticipated.
Project teams will select candidate parts, define performance requirements, and generate shared, validated data demonstrating that the AM material meets or exceeds the critical properties of the legacy alloys it is intended to substitute. The goal is to enable broad, cross-platform use of AM materials, reduce redundant testing, and accelerate qualification so AM solutions can be adopted quickly and confidently across the defense industrial base.
Proposed efforts are expected to deliver actionable insights that reduce technical and industrial risk, support practical pathways to transition, and provide shared value to both the DoW and the organic industrial base.
The MIAMI project call consists of two phases, beginning with Phase 0. This phase will provide a documented assessment of applications and traditional materials where the selected AM material is expected to serve as a viable substitute.
- Planning: Define qualification-ready process, material, and feedstock specifications and provide a rigorous analysis identifying where the selected AM material can replace legacy components across a weapons system, including priority use cases, performance requirements, and adoption conditions.
- Process definition: Develop process control documentation.
- Preliminary data: Conduct preliminary qualification testing to confirm that the defined process controls produce AM material with room temperature mechanical properties that meet established threshold requirements.
This Phase 0 work will be followed by a final phase where comprehensive testing and demonstration will be executed based on the test plan developed in Phase 0.