https://3dprint.com/322826/questek-space-bet-new-alloys-built-for-3d-printing-not-for-the-old-rules/
QuesTek’s Space Bet: New Alloys Built for 3D Printing, Not for the Old Rules
December 29, 2025 08:30 am
If you ask most people what’s holding back 3D printing in aerospace, they usually think the answer is better hardware; mainly faster machines, bigger build chambers, and tighter process control.
But Jason Sebastian wants users to look somewhere else. “People have no idea how important materials are,” he told 3DPrint.com.
Sebastian is Executive VP at QuesTek Innovations, a materials design and engineering company based near Chicago.
QuesTek designs and develops new metal alloys for demanding manufacturing applications, especially when parts need to survive extreme heat, pressure, and oxygen-rich environments.
And in space, “extreme conditions” are unavoidable.
When metal 3D printing became a materials problem
QuesTek has been around for about 25 years, long before metal additive manufacturing (AM) became mainstream. Sebastian said the company started in the world of traditional metallurgy, with steels, aluminum, and nickel, all tied to casting and forging.
Then AM arrived, and it changed the rules. He explained that AM isn’t just “the same metal, shaped differently.” To print, you typically turn metal into powder or wire, then melt and solidify it quickly, layer by layer.
That process creates a different internal structure than the material would get in a mold or a forge.
“It’s a whole new paradigm of material science. You’ve got to make it into a powder, and then you’ve got to print it, which is kind of like a very rapid solidification. And so that leads to really interesting things with the material and the microstructure.”
In the early days, he said, the industry was mostly focused on simply getting machines to work, making layers consistent, spreading powder reliably, and reducing porosity.
But as companies started pushing printed parts into serious applications, they ran into a harder reality: materials behave differently when printed.
“It’s not a surprise that alloys that were designed for regular casting or forging don’t quite operate the same way in additive,” he said. “So you need to design new materials for additive.”
That sentence is the core of QuesTek’s pitch to the space world: don’t force old alloys to behave inside a new process. Instead, “design alloys that want to be printed.”
“Materials by design,” not trial-and-error
QuesTek’s approach is sometimes described as “materials by design” (in fact, “Materials by Design®” is one of the company’s trademarks), building alloys using computational modeling and then validating them with targeted testing, rather than relying on brute-force trial and error.
Sebastian described AM as a “perfect place for that mindset,” because the process creates new structures inside the metal, and those structures determine performance.
When I asked how QuesTek’s approach is different from traditional materials development, he pointed out that materials scientists often talk about the relationship between process, structure, and properties.
Most people, he said, skip the “structure” part and jump straight from process to properties. But in aerospace, structure is everything.
And in additive, structure can shift dramatically, with rapid solidification patterns, layered features, and microstructures that don’t look like anything you’d get from a conventional route.
A DARPA moment that helped “de-mystify” AM
Sebastian traced a big part of QuesTek’s additive manufacturing history back to a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program around 2010–2011, when qualification and certification were big unknowns for printed metal parts.
The program included teams led by major aerospace and defense players. QuesTek worked on a Honeywell-led effort focused on a high-performance nickel superalloy called 718Plus, which was used in hot sections of engines.
The question was simple but pretty big: what happens when you print it?
“We built models around rapid solidification, microstructure, and expected strength, then used limited test data to estimate how strength would vary across builds and powder lots. Our models allow us to establish that minimum, with much less experimental data,” Sebastian said.
For aerospace, that “minimum” property value matters because it’s what designers trust when lives and missions are at stake. Once you can predict that behavior, Sebastian said, additive manufacturing no longer has to be “treated like black magic.”
“It established the role of computational modeling at the center of all this additive stuff,” he said.
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