An Innovative Mass Spectrometer to Accelerate Material Characterization for Reverse Engineering

Technology development under this Phase II project will contribute to fulfilling the national defense-related mission need for rapid, cost-effective material testing. The mission impact on the DAF will be a new solution for chemical analyses supporting reverse engineering efforts. As part of its mission, Air Force Sustainment Center (AFSC) performs material testing for reverse engineering and rapid prototyping. An important aspect of material testing is verifying the material’s chemical composition. Traditional testing methods for chemical composition are neither time- nor cost-effective, which prevents AFSC from completing its projects with sufficient material information. In some cases, projects are canceled altogether. Until now, no single analytical instrument provides high-sensitivity measurements of the full periodic table of elements, near-nondestructive analyses, and simplified, low-cost operations. Addressing the challenges of traditional scientific instruments, Exum Instruments developed the Massbox, a versatile tool combining high performance with ease-of-use into a compact, desktop package. Under this proposed Phase II effort, Exum will continue testing and evaluating a complete end-to-end solution for rapid, cost-effective chemical analysis of common aerospace metal alloys. Project objectives include: 1) deploy the Massbox at the Reverse Engineering and Critical Tooling (REACT) Lab at Tinker AFB; 2) use samples of common aerospace metal alloys to evaluate the Massbox, ensuring its accuracy, precision, and reliability meet DAF needs for reverse engineering; 3) work jointly with REACT to establish operating procedures for testing common metal alloys used in the aerospace industry with the Massbox; and 4) develop a software module that automatically determines the metal alloy from an unknown sample using a machine-learning algorithm.