Phase3D Lands Air Force Contract to Inspect Ceramic Matrix Composites in Real Time

What the contract covers

The Department of the Air Force awarded Phase3D a new contract to extend its Fringe Inspection platform into ceramic matrix composites. CMCs are the materials being eyed for next-generation turbine blades, hypersonic vehicle skins, and rocket thermal protection tiles. They can survive temperatures that melt metal, but they are extraordinarily difficult to qualify.

Traditional quality control for CMCs relies on post-process CT scans and destructive testing. That is slow, expensive, and it means defects are found only after a part is finished. Phase3D's approach uses structured-light scanning to build a surface heightmap during production. The new Air Force funding will adapt that same system to CMC tape fabrication, ply stacking, autoclave consolidation, pyrolysis, melt infiltration, and machining.

Why this matters for additive manufacturing

Metal additive manufacturing went through the same growing pain. For years, parts were printed, scanned, and often scrapped because there was no way to spot a flaw before it propagated. Real-time inspection changed that equation. Phase3D is now trying to bring the same layer-by-layer visibility to CMCs.

The work will be carried out with Air Force Life Cycle Management Center stakeholders and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Phase3D has already engaged Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex and Ellsworth Air Force Base on prior programs. If the Phase I effort proves feasible, the next step would be validation protocols that let inspectors accept or reject a part while it is still being built.

The stakes

CMC production is a bottleneck for the New Space economy and for hypersonic programs. Thermal protection tiles, turbine blades, and heat shields are all constrained by the same problem: you cannot afford to wait weeks for a CT scan just to discover a porosity issue. A real-time inspection layer changes the economics of high-temperature composites dramatically.

Phase3D's Fringe Operator software already visualizes anomalies for metal AM. Extending it to CMCs is not a trivial software update. It requires new calibration routines and anomaly-classification models trained on a completely different material behavior. The Air Force contract specifically funds that development.

Ceramic matrix composites are notoriously hard to qualify because so much can go wrong across so many stages. The industry has been trying to solve that with post-process CT scans and destructive testing, the same approach that held back metal additive manufacturing. Real-time, layer-by-layer visibility is exactly what this class of materials needs.

The contract is a Phase I award. It does not guarantee a production deployment, but it does confirm that the Air Force sees CMC inspection as a solvable problem and that Phase3D is the team to solve it.