Purdue PART Lab Convenes Scoping Workshop for Advanced Manufacturing Competency Center
On April 17, 2026, Purdue University and AltForm brought together leaders from industry, government, and academia for a scoping workshop focused on establishing a new competency center for the advanced and additive manufacturing of critical components and materials. The workshop was held at Purdue Research Labs at Kepner in Lafayette and was organized by Mike Sealy, Luz Sotelo, Mike Titus, and Farshid Sadeghi from Purdue.
More than 30 participants represented organizations spanning aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, materials, and advanced manufacturing. Discussions centered on a common challenge facing additive manufacturing: while the technology has matured considerably, significant barriers remain in moving from successful prototypes to scalable, repeatable, and certifiable production systems.
Several priorities emerged from the workshop, including hybrid manufacturing, AI-enabled process monitoring, accelerated materials qualification, digital traceability, repair and sustainment, feedstock innovation, and workforce development. Participants emphasized the need to move beyond stand-alone manufacturing technologies toward integrated systems that combine additive, subtractive, coating, inspection, and repair operations.
A major outcome of the meeting was a vision for a collaborative center built around three pillars: Digital & Certifiable Manufacturing, Hybrid Manufacturing for Critical Components, and Accelerated Materials & Process Development. The proposed center would combine Purdue capabilities across METL for materials and durability, CORIA for sensing and intelligent manufacturing, MMRL for advanced and additive manufacturing, and PARI for secure large-scale prototyping and testing. Together, these resources could create an integrated pathway from design and manufacturing through validation and deployment.
The workshop marked an important first step toward building a broader industry-guided advanced manufacturing consortium, with industrial and government partners helping define research needs, Purdue developing technical solutions, and AltForm supporting the transition of those solutions toward production-ready applications. The long-term vision is to establish a national-scale hub capable of accelerating the industrialization of advanced manufacturing technologies while strengthening U.S. manufacturing capability, supply-chain resilience, and workforce development.
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