ACMI Federal has secured a $50-million contract from the US Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division to support the development of a new research and production initiative focused on energetics.
The category includes explosives, propellants, and related materials used in munitions.
Under the program, funding will be used to establish the Maryland Energetics Innovation Hub, a facility planned near the US Navy’s Indian Head site, with construction expected to begin in the second quarter of this year.
The hub will bring together industry, academia, and government partners to address constraints in the US munitions industrial base, linking research and development with scalable production to improve manufacturing capacity and efficiency.
It will serve as a coordination point for testing new manufacturing methods and material innovations, which can then be transferred to other production sites.
According to ACMI Federal, the initiative is intended to address challenges in the US munitions industrial base by improving production efficiency and accelerating applied innovation.
Technical Focus Areas
ACMI’s approach builds on a similar industrial hub model previously implemented by the company in Indiana under a separate US Department of Defense agreement, aimed at linking innovation with distributed production capacity.
Work at the site will concentrate on eight areas defined by the navy, combining manufacturing, materials science, and system integration.
Activities include the use of high-performance computing to model and optimize production processes, as well as efforts to integrate energetics into uncrewed systems and to develop new synthesis methods for energetic materials.
The program also includes inspection methods such as non-destructive testing, which allows components to be checked without damaging them, along with the use of automation and artificial intelligence to streamline manufacturing processes.
Further work will address production processes for propulsion systems and warheads, the management of obsolescence in existing energetic formulations, and the scaling of high-throughput manufacturing for non-energetic components.
