DARPA Backs Research Project to Speed Up Qualification of DoD’s 3D Printed Parts

About a year ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a funding opportunity called SURGE: Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Endurance. As with so much of what the Department of Defense (DoD) is focused on when it comes to additive manufacturing (AM), the purpose of the SURGE project is to both accelerate and cheapen the process of qualifying DoD-relevant printed parts.

DARPA has recently announced the recipients of a $10.3 million, four-year grant, which includes large research universities like Auburn, the standards organization ASTM International, and private companies such as in-situ monitoring software provider Addiguru. One recipient, Texas A&M University, received $1.6 million from the funding grant to develop a sensor package that can be installed on commercially-available 3D printers for real-time monitoring.

Researchers from the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) will work with Addiguru to develop the sensor, while also coordinating its work with researchers from ASTM International, the University of Michigan, and engineering software firm AlphaSTAR to optimize the system’s predictive capabilities. Ultimately, the aim of the research is to yield substantial cost savings for DoD AM efforts, in turn speeding up adoption rates.

In a press release about Texas A&M’s award of $1.6 million from DARPA’s SURGE grant, Dr. Mohsen Taheri Andani, a member of the grant team and a Texas A&M assistant professor of mechanical engineering, said, “This is an exciting moment for the [AM] field, a community that increasingly recognizes the urgent need to accelerate the qualification of 3D-printed parts. By integrating in-situ data with the underlying micro structural features formed during printing, the program will bridge expertise in process monitoring, microstructure characterization, and property evaluation — paving the way for faster, more reliable deployment of additive-manufactured parts.”

Another member of the grant team, Texas A&M head of the department of materials science and engineering, Dr. Ibrahim Karaman, said, “This DARPA project is particularly exciting for us because it represents a unique opportunity to address one of the most critical challenges facing the field today. We are confident that this work will have a transformative impact on industry and help unlock the potential of [AM] at scale.”

The most intriguing angle to the SURGE project is what DARPA noted in the original funding announcement from early 2024: “If successful, SURGE will enable distributed AM for point-of-need production of critical parts and expand the potential defense industrial base in times of surge production demand.”

Not only does this represent a major long-term objective associated with scaling up AM (and especially metal AM), but it also aligns rather closely with a number of AM projects that the U.S. military has publicly revealed lately. This suggests that a broader coherence has emerged to unify all the many, seemingly fragmented R&D initiatives that the DoD as a whole has put into motion: and that decentralized manufacturing is that unifying thread.

In my recent interview with Fabian Alefeld from EOS and Dr. Justin Rettaliata from the U.S. Navy, Dr. Rettaliata specifically referenced the ability to achieve “distributed production capabilities” as a major catalyst behind the Navy’s rapidly increasing interest in AM. While it is not news that AM stakeholders, in general, and those in the military, in particular, are interested in leveraging the technology for distributed production, there does seem to be something new about how much of an emphasis DoD has placed on this capability in recent months.

Moreover, the significance of such a development can’t be overstated, insofar as truly distributed production remains such a difficult feat to accomplish, and as its accomplishment on a wide scale would signify AM’s ability to genuinely deliver on its promise to make supply chains more resilient. It is impossible to say at this point how successful this R&D project will be. But if we’re going by the timeline DARPA seems to have in mind, major decision-makers involved in the DoD’s AM efforts may see 2030 as a realistic initial target for making AM-enabled, distributed production networks more commonplace.

Images courtesy of Texas A&M Engineering/Leon Contreras.