Mobile Expeditionary 3D Concrete Printer (MX3DCP)

SBIR topic DAF27BZ02-DV024 (U.S. Department of Defense – Air Force), Phase I and II. Open to U.S. small businesses. Opens: December 2, 2026. Closes: January 6, 2027. Problem: The U.S. Air Force faces an urgent and growing gap in its ability to rapidly harden, repair, and reconstitute expeditionary airbase infrastructure during combat operations. Recent attacks against airbase infrastructure in the Middle East have reinforced a reality already evident in planning for the Indo-Pacific and other contested theaters: U.S. forces must be able to operate from bases that are vulnerable to missiles, rockets, artillery, one-way unmanned aircraft, and fragmentation-producing weapons. Current expeditionary infrastructure is often too slow to construct, too logistics-intensive to transport, or too lightly protected to provide meaningful survivability under modern attack conditions. Put bluntly, the Air Force has spent decades building exquisite kill chains while too often housing the Airmen who sustain them in tents, trailers, and flat-walled structures that were never designed for the threat environment now arriving overhead.Opportunity: 3D concrete printing offers a potential step-change in expeditionary construction by enabling military engineers to rapidly print protective structures using automated or semi-automated construction workflows, reduced skilled labor, and locally available cementitious materials where feasible. Prior work has demonstrated that cementitious materials can be printed, that full-scale structures can be produced with mobile 3DCP systems, and that limited blast testing can be performed on printed wall assemblies. However, the existing state of the art has not yet fully addressed the combined problem that matters most for combat survivability: printable expeditionary materials, field-executable operator workflows, and structure geometry deliberately optimized to mitigate blast-wave behavior and fragmentation effects.This Direct-to-Phase II effort will…