 In the future, soldiers needing replacement parts may turn to 3D printers to rapidly deliver reliable and ultra-strong metal parts. At the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, materials manufacturing scientists say this technology may change everything. I think it's going to probably revolutionize logistics, so we're still a long ways out from that, but really added manufacturing is going to have a huge impact on sustainment so you can really reduce your logistics footprint. So instead of worrying about carrying a whole truckload, convoys, loads of spares, as long as you have the materials, raw materials and a printer, you can potentially make anything you need. Army researchers are looking at new technologies to create steel alloy parts from powder using a laser. For example, we've done some stuff with our collaborators where we're able to print parts with internal structures that they would not necessarily be able to create with that much dimensional accuracy where they use to try to mill or like machine a part. The researchers are using an alloy originally developed by the U.S. Air Force. The Army adapted the metal to powder form. This material that we've just printed and developed processing parameters for is probably about 50% stronger than anything commercially available. For Army applications, the key to usage is certification. So the part work is needed in a battlefield scenario. For instance, we've printed some impeller fans for the M1 Abrams turbine engine and we can deliver that part. They can use it. It works. That may be good enough. You'll be able to get your tank running again for hours or days if that's important to the mission. But on the other hand, we still need to be able to answer, okay, does this perform as good as the OEM part? Does it perform better? Which is ultimately what we like to help mitigate the failures that we see in the first place. The Air Force initially developed this alloy for bunker-busting bomb applications. They needed a metal that was very high strength, but it also needed to be economical. The nice thing about that for the Army is it has wide-ranging applications. So we have interest from the ground combat vehicle community, so it can be used for replacement parts. A lot of our parts and ground vehicles now are steel, so this can be dropped in as a replacement, not having to worry about material properties because you know it's going to be better. So the chance of it breaking are going to be lower than your previous part. The laboratory is working closely with industry and academic researchers to model new alloy designs, perform computational thermodynamics and expedite the process to get these materials to soldiers. What does the next generation alloy look like? How do we take the knowledge we learned from this steel and push it even further to get even better materials?