General Atomics Leads $5.5M Push to Qualify Aluminum for Metal 3D Printing

Aluminum is everywhere. Metal 3D printing still struggles with it.

7075 aluminum is the workhorse of aerospace and defense brackets, casings, and structural parts. It is light, strong, and well understood by engineers. But in metal additive manufacturing, especially laser powder bed fusion, the same alloy behaves differently from machine to machine. That variability is the obstacle the GOTHAAM project aims to remove.

What the $5.5M covers

The Generation Of Technical-data for High-strength Aluminium Alloy Material program, or GOTHAAM, is funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of War Manufacturing Technology Office through America Makes and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is leading the project call.

The target is a 7075-T73-equivalent alloy across three classes of LPBF systems: small, medium, and large format. Delivering corrosion-resistant, aerospace-grade material data for all three would let OEMs and the defense industrial base move from single-machine testing to scalable production.

Software is part of the build

Dyndrite is contributing its SASSQUATCH methodology to the effort. The system gives software-level control over laser assignment, toolpath zoning, gas flow, scan speed, and layer height. The idea is to show that controlling these variables increases process consistency across different printers, which generates the equivalency datasets that qualification currently lacks.

Harshil Goel, Dyndrite's CEO, put it plainly: changing a machine, site, or parameter set today can mean repeating enormous amounts of qualification work. GOTHAAM is testing whether explicit process control through software can shrink that rework.

Why this matters beyond defense

Defense contracts often drive the hardest qualification requirements, but the data trickles down. If GOTHAAM produces repeatable, cross-platform allowables for a widely used aluminum alloy, commercial aerospace and high-end motorsport customers benefit too. The return on investment is not just in one bracket or one supplier. It is in making metal AM a predictable manufacturing choice instead of a research project.

The qualification problem has been the longest pole in the metal AM tent for years. Projects like GOTHAAM are not flashy, but they are the kind of infrastructure that determines whether the technology stays in prototyping labs or moves onto factory floors.