 Future American soldiers will be better protected in combat by stronger and lighter body armor. Innovative work at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is using nature as the inspiration for breakthroughs in additive manufacturing and material science. So my project is to design a system that can 3D print armor ceramics that will allow production of parts with graded structures similar to an abalone structure in nature that will improve ceramic armor's toughness and survivability with lower weight. Helz spent this summer working with Army scientists and designed and built a unique 3D printer. It's fed down these tubes and into the printhead where an auger can both mix inline and extrude. So I can extrude material A, I can extrude material B or I can extrude any ratio of material. He found a way to implement our ideas into that machine, take apart the machine, take out the polymer FDM heads that are built into it, start to look at how to design the machine to incorporate our ceramic slurries and print those slurries into the head. But then he had to do a lot of really basic work looking at how to actually hack the machine. Helz took advantage of computer programming skills and knowledge of the Internet of Things or IoT to hack into a 3D printer and manipulate the device's fan controls as a means to customize the print ratio from one syringe of raw material to another. He even 3D printed the parts for his novel 3D printing head. This project is unique because it combines additive manufacturing, advanced ceramic forming techniques and bio-inspired design. Our goal is to be able to make these innovative designs out of these ceramics, and so for us to get there we're going to have to figure out some of the challenges required for getting to that goal first in terms of materials processing challenges that we're facing. Vargas Gonzalez explained that hard ceramic materials defeat kinetic energy projectiles by shattering them into pieces and decreasing the projectiles' penetration ability. I started working on this project to create next generation antennas with graded structures and then transitioned into using armor ceramic materials such as boron carbide and silicon carbide and trying to produce parts that had a gradient or internal structures impossible to produce with traditional ceramic forming techniques. We've got people like Josh who are very gifted and talented and can bring all that kind of capability in and use that to our advantage, it's a huge benefit for us. So right now I'm loading the paste. Peltz said he really likes the freedom additive manufacturing provides to test his ideas. I hope to use this system that I've designed as well as the processing of creating these armor ceramics and creating armor ceramic composites to develop both next generation armor but also apply it to you know various other fields such as a biomedical implant you could you know you could use this same system to produce ceramic implants for say a hip replacement or a knee replacement. This system gives the ability to produce graded parts so composite ceramic parts for really any application with any material.