Phase3D Lands Air Force Funding to Extend Fringe Inspection to Ceramic Matrix Composites

What the contract covers

Phase3D will extend its Fringe Inspection platform into ceramic matrix composites after receiving funding from the Department of the Air Force. CMCs are increasingly central to next-generation propulsion, hypersonic vehicles, and thermal-protection systems, but conventional inspection methods cannot reliably detect the failure modes that are specific to ceramic materials.

The gap is real and practical. Conventional non-destructive evaluation methods were built for metals and polymer composites. They struggle to catch matrix cracking, fiber pull-out, porosity, and delamination inside CMCs. Those are exactly the defects that kill turbine blades and thermal-protection components. The Air Force needs a way to catch them before a part ships, not after it fails.

How Fringe Inspection works

Fringe Inspection uses structured light projection to measure the powder bed surface after every layer of a metal AM build. The system takes micron-level heightmaps and flags anomalies like recoater streaks, hops, and shortfeeds in real time. Operators get objective data instead of waiting for post-build CT scans.

For CMCs, Phase3D is adapting those same measurement techniques to the different defect signatures that appear in ceramic matrix builds. The structured-light approach translates directly: it still detects surface deviations, just calibrated for the geometry and layup behavior of ceramic plies rather than metal powder.

Who will use it

The immediate users are three Air Force organizations already pushing CMCs into operational systems: the Life Cycle Management Center's Propulsion Directorate, the Rapid Sustainment Office, and the Air Force Research Laboratory's Materials and Manufacturing Directorate. All three need deployable inspection tools that work at depots, OEM facilities, and research labs.

Phase3D has worked with the DoD before. The company completed a $1.25 million Air Force project deploying Fringe Inspection Cold Spray at Ellsworth Air Force Base. It has also collaborated with AFRL and NASA on correlating in-situ heightmaps to porosity in final parts. This contract builds on that track record by targeting a different material class.

Why it matters

Ceramic matrix composites offer better thermal resistance, strength-to-weight ratio, and oxidation resistance than traditional metals. Hypersonic vehicles and next-generation turbine engines depend on them. The barrier to wider adoption has always been inspection: you cannot certify parts at scale without a reliable way to check them during production.

In-process monitoring changes that calculation. Rather than building a batch and then CT-scanning a sample, operators get layer-by-layer quality data during the build. That reduces scrap and shortens qualification timelines. For a branch trying to field new engines and airframes under schedule pressure, that is a meaningful operational advantage.

The bottom line

This is a focused government contract aimed at a specific bottleneck. Phase3D is not reinventing inspection. It is adapting an existing structured-light platform to a material class that the Air Force urgently needs to qualify. If the technology translates from metal powder beds to ceramic plies as cleanly as Phase3D expects, it removes one of the structural reasons CMC adoption has been slow across defense production lines.