NCAME grows applied research role in defense supply chain through Austal USA, Amaero partnerships
Published: Dec 19, 2025 11:00 AM
By Jeremy Henderson
Thanks to two new partnerships formed to address critical needs in the aerospace and maritime defense industries, Auburn University's reputation for rapid additive manufacturing (AM) research and development is speeding up and making waves.
Earlier this year, Amaero, a leading U.S. manufacturer of refractory and titanium alloy AM powders for aerospace and defense sectors, tasked researchers within Auburn's National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence (NCAME) to assess the performance characteristics of their AM Nb-C103 and Ti-6Al-4V powder products.
"Nb-C103 applications are associated with extreme heat as it has very high melting temperatures compared to Ni-based superalloys," said NCAME research engineer Scot Carpenter.
With a price tag as high as $4,000 per kilogram, Nb-C103 can be a difficult material to secure and interrogate, particularly in a research setting.
"We've developed a high-throughput, iterative process development approach allowing Amaero to provide NCAME with minimal material and get a quick picture of the process-structure-property relationships,” Carpenter said. “The target is for us to be able to turn this around in a matter of weeks so that the next iteration isn't slowed by the need to send samples out to multiple laboratories to assess these relationships. The enabler here is that NCAME has the full fabrication to data value chain within our control, enabling us to expedite the printing, testing and characterization to meet the needs of the AM industry.”
Eric Bono, Amaero chief technology officer, agrees.
"Amaero moves very fast and decisively in response to market needs for both small and large volume powder orders,” Bono said. “NCAME served as an extension of our development team and was able to execute programs that generated printing parameters and mechanical properties faster than many commercial companies can do."
That sort of rapid turnaround is crucial for the AM industry.
"Additive manufacturing offers many solutions to our nation’s industrial capacity but this can be diminished by having to engage multiple specialized laboratories to fully evaluate the process-structure-property relationships,” said Nima Shamsaei, Phillips WestPoint Distinguished Professor and Director of NCAME.
"This partnership specifically leverages NCAME's expertise and capabilities to provide answers within weeks, as opposed to months or years if outsourced."
The need for speed also extends to military readiness at sea.
Austal USA, a shipbuilding company with multiple ship construction and maintenance contracts with the Navy and Coast Guard, is also partnering with NCAME to overcome challenges by diminished access to conventional manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. The lead time for many forged or cast parts can be one to two years, especially for the low volumes typically needed by the Department of War.
AM offers not only a near term solution for these parts but wider design freedom and often better mechanical performance compared to casting.
"The ultimate goal of this project is to establish the correlation between in-situ sensing data and the resulting defect/micro-structure," said Connor Headley, research engineer for Austal USA.
That correlation ultimately governs a part’s mechanical properties.
"We're assisting Austal USA in building up material allowables" — the stress and strain limits for a material — "which are statistically derived data sets of mechanical properties for materials of interest," Carpenter said.
Carpenter calls those numbers crucial for design and performance predictability, which strongly factors into AM adoption for structural applications.
Shamsaei said that satisfactorily meeting those sorts of standards for statistically validated material allowables is something most academic research doesn’t achieve.
NCAME does.
“Our applied research division within NCAME allows us to provide tremendous value to the end use case, establishing specification minimums for AM parts, while also exploring how these conventional validation approaches can be improved upon with modern manufacturing techniques such as in-process monitoring,” Shamsaei said.
Media Contact: , jdh0123@auburn.edu, 334-844-3591![NCAME's partnership with Austal USA, an American shipbuilder advancing the Navy’s submarine production capacity, is growing the NCAME applied research division’s role in defense supply chain. [U.S. Navy photo courtesy of General Dynamics Electric Boat.]](http://eng.auburn.edu/images/_wide/cropped---2025-12-19T112150.980.jpg)
NCAME's partnership with Austal USA, an American shipbuilder advancing the Navy’s submarine production capacity, is growing the NCAME applied research division’s role in defense supply chain. [U.S. Navy photo courtesy of General Dynamics Electric Boat.]
