Joint AM program aims to make LPBF parts interoperable between U.S. and UK defense

The industry networks America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining have announced the recipients of a new research program funded with a total of USD 1.1 million. Financed by the Manufacturing Technology Office of the U.S. Department of Defense, the project aims to make additive manufacturing processes comparable and interchangeable between the supply chains of the U.S. Department of Defense and the UK Ministry of Defence. The focus is on the Laser Powder Bed Fusion process for safety-critical metal components.

The backdrop is the growing importance of additive manufacturing for military maintenance and spare parts supply. Shorter lead times, digital inventories, and the production of complex geometries are seen as advantages, but in practice they encounter regulatory and technical hurdles. In particular, the qualification of machines, materials, and processes remains a bottleneck when parts are to be manufactured across multiple sites.

“Defense sustainment continues to rely on legacy materials and processes that do not meet today’s operational demands. This effort enables teams to propose and demonstrate a qualification framework for metal additive manufacturing suppliers in both the United States and the United Kingdom, thereby ensuring consistent part quality across allied nations,” said Ben DiMarco, Technology Transition Director at America Makes.

The program addresses this challenge by defining criteria for process equivalence between U.S. and UK LPBF systems. This includes not only machine parameters and powder lots, but also data formats, design approvals, and security requirements along the supply chain. The goal is to reproducibly manufacture identical parts regardless of production location, without having to qualify each manufacturing site separately.

“Defense sustainment still relies on legacy materials and processes that fall short of today’s operational demands. This effort enables teams to propose and demonstrate a qualification framework for metal additive manufacturing suppliers in both the U.S and the U.K, ensuring consistent parts across allied nations,” said Ben DiMarco, Technology Transition Director at America Makes. “We’re honored to work with leading global experts to prove AM equivalency and interoperability. By advancing laser powder bed fusion qualification and accelerating real-world adoption, we’re demonstrating how collaboration can overcome technical, regulatory, and supply chain hurdles to deliver tangible results to the warfighter and allied defense operations.”

Additive manufacturing could complement these structures, but requires robust qualification frameworks. The project is intended to demonstrate how metal AM suppliers in both countries can be evaluated against uniform standards.

In the long term, the collaboration is expected to help build a distributed, internationally networked manufacturing base that functions even under complex operational conditions. For the industrial use of LPBF in the defense environment, this could be an important step toward standardized and interoperable processes.