Metal AM never had a printer problem - the problem was where nobody was looking
America Makes and NCDMM have announced the winners of a $2 million project call funded by the Department of Defense’s ManTech Office
Atomic Layer of the Week:
For an entire decade, the industry has been selling the idea that metal 3D printing would finally reach full-scale production as soon as machines became faster, larger, and cheaper.
The machines became faster, larger, and cheaper. And yet you still cannot simply take a metal 3D-printed part and install it in a jet engine.
The reason is both trivial and incredibly difficult to solve. Before anyone allows a printed part to fly, it must be qualified. Qualification in metal additive manufacturing means mountains of physical testing to generate B-basis and C-basis data.
Because, as Dyndrite’s Harshil Goel puts it: the machine is a black box. You put powder in, press a button, and get a part whose properties can only be fully understood after destroying it in a mechanical testing machine. Again and again, hundreds of times.
At its core, the problem is uncertainty.
And in aerospace and defense, uncertainty is paid for with time and money. Jonathan Cohen of Mimo Technik states it plainly:
the biggest barriers to scaling metal additive manufacturing has been the time and cost associated with qualification and materials testing.
That’s it. Everything else is engineering detail.
What is actually changing
America Makes and NCDMM have announced the winners of a $2 million project call funded by the ManTech Office (OSW ManTech). The AIM-4AM (Artificial Intelligence for Material Allowables in Additive Manufacturing) program aims to create an AI-driven framework that identifies and quantifies risk in the current approach to generating material allowables for LPBF-produced 17-4PH stainless steel in the H1025 condition.
The winning team is led by Dyndrite, a software company built around its GPU-powered ACE geometric engine. Along stand Mimo Technik responsible for controlled builds and test coordination, and RTX serving as the transition partner for aerospace and defense applications. Together they will develop a framework that models the relationships between process parameters, material structure, and material properties.
It will then identify which physical tests provide the greatest amount of information.
The practical goal is straightforward: safely reduce the number of required tests and associate every such reduction with a calculated probabilistic risk level. The demonstration will focus on a single material and a single process: LPBF.
The team will generate preliminary qualification datasets for 17-4PH H1025 and evaluate whether the model’s predictions match the actual results of tensile and fatigue testing.
If they do, some physical testing can be replaced by computation. If they do not, that will be valuable information as well.
Here, qualification is created through mathematics and statistics.
Before anyone opens the champagne
Now for some cold water, because without it this article would become a press release itself.
A $2 million budget is not an overwhelming amount of money.
The program focuses on a single grade of steel in a single heat-treatment condition.
At this stage, it is merely a framework demonstrator, far removed from becoming a standard that could be incorporated into aerospace specifications tomorrow.
The path from “we demonstrated that it works for 17-4PH” to “we trust it for a critical component made from a more challenging material” is long and paved with the caution of people whose job is to make sure airplanes do not fall out of the sky.
Goel himself does not hide this reality. He openly states that he fully understands the hesitation surrounding the generation of material allowables through new methodologies and that trust must be established through rigorous validation.
Such honesty is rare in an industry that often promises superpowers.
The verdict
The chaos in the 3D printing industry continues. Bankruptcies, consolidations, and announcements of “breakthroughs” that age faster than the milk we forgot to put back in the refrigerator this morning.
Yet, at the same time, something genuinely important and potentially transformative is happening in the background: someone is finally tackling the least glamorous part of the entire equation - trust, statistics. the ability of a machine to tell us how much confidence we can place in it.
Goel sees an even broader opportunity: accelerating adoption through intelligent parameter selection and by building confidence in the manufacturing process itself. He is right, although the road ahead is longer than this budget might suggest.
For more than a decade, the industry has been trying to win by selling increasingly capable printers, while the real bottleneck has been somewhere else entirely.
It is encouraging to see someone finally taking that bottleneck apart, even if, for now, they have only $2 million and a single piece of steel to work with.
In the end, it is simply mathematics and physics.
Atomic Layer from the Past:
9 years ago Formlabs launched the Fuse 1, its first selective laser sintering (SLS) machine, priced at $9,999 - 20x cheaper than industrial rivals. The printer supported Nylon PA 12/11. Formlabs also unveiled Form Cell, an automated SLA production system with robotic gantry for 24/7 digital factory operations.
Read all:
And 8 years ago, 3D Systems launched two metal printers: DMP Flex 100 for R&D and small, complex parts, and DMP Dental 100 for labs - printing 90 crowns in under four hours as an entry-level solution.
Read all:
News & Gossip:
#1
Formlabs put up a teaser: a wooden crate, a spray-painted logo, reading “Something big is coming,” and a countdown to June 9, 15:00 CEST on YouTube. No name, no specs, no process, no price. “Big” obviously means large format, so my bet is a bigger printer. Most likely SLS-type (mark may words).
#2
UnionTech just booked 120 systems across two deals: 100 SLA machines to Dongguan Fohan, 20 metal printers to Dongguan Huanya. Fohan already runs 1,600+ UnionTech SLA units, so this is a regular topping up his fleet, not a revolution. The real story is the metal push: three SLM machines since 2023, a four-laser model built for shoe molds, and 150 million RMB sunk into a Jinjiang project.
#3
UnionTech orders look big. But in bigger picture they’re a rounding error. China just flipped 3D printing from spec focus to capacity focus. BLT is sinking 3.1 billion RMB into Phase IV plus a billion more on powder. Farsoon wants 3.91 billion. FFF print farms in Jiangsu reportedly hit 20,000 machines, and one buyer grabbed 15,000 Bambu units at once. Service prices crashed to 0.2 RMB per gram. Sounds absurd, but read the insider’s report on this.
#4
Meanwhile in the West, Sandvik just sold its entire AM unit to investment firm Mimir, after two decades in the business. The deal covers metal powders, MIM, and hot isostatic pressing, and it lands barely a year after Sandvik launched a patent-pending MAR 55 powder and signed on with Additive Industries.
Same outfit that dumped its BEAMIT stake in 2024 and “refocused on powders.”
Now it’s refocusing on the exit, booking a 230 million SEK impairment on the way out. CEO calls it positioning for the “next growth phase.”
For someone else, evidently.
#5
Stratasys opened a 200,000-square-foot Americas HQ in Minnetonka. There was official ribbon-cutting, there were the Crumps, and even two members of Congress. ARCH bundles engineering, R&D, and customer collaboration “under one roof,” which mostly means moving teams that already existed into a nicer building.
The press release leans hard on jobs, national security, and a passed ISO 14001/45001 audit. Real estate and ISO certs aren’t a strategy, but with Sandvik exit, a Western company opening new HQ still counts as a win.
#6
Axtra3D also took a bigger 17,000-square-foot site in Vicenza. Company wants to anchor its European operations: materials, engineering, manufacturing, and support under one roof.
The difference from the others in this thread is the demand behind it: 55%+ repeat-customer growth and rising installs since 2021, with Toyota, LPE, and Protolabs on the reference list.
Founder Gianni Zitelli swears it’s “not simply about adding space,” which is exactly what everyone adding space says. But repeat buyers are the one signal that’s hard to fake. Five years in, that’s a company growing into its building, not decorating it.