Metrology for Additive Manufacturing to Come of Age
Currently, there’s not enough data for designers and manufacturers to accurately predict the performance of some additive-manufactured parts.
GAITHERSBURG, MD — NIST is helping additive manufacturing, often referred to as 3D printing, mature from a potentially disruptive technology into a widespread industrial capability.
NIST’s Material Measurement Lab contributes to the measurement methods, standards, data, and models required to realize the full promise of additive manufacturing, which frees designers to create novel shapes that are stronger and lighter and require less material and energy to make them. While the field is growing rapidly, with expected revenues from products and services to exceed $6.5 billion by 2019, there’s still a great deal of promise to be realized. Currently, there’s not enough data for designers and manufacturers to accurately predict the performance of some additive-manufactured parts, so it has not been widely adopted by the aerospace, biomedical, and automotive industries for parts where a failure of that component would result in the catastrophic loss of the whole structure.