The Critical Role of Ultrasound in Advance Additive Manufacturing for Industrial Applications
Inspection plays a critical role during all phases of product development and implementation, making UT methods an enabling technology for new AM applications.
The rapid increase in the use and interest in additive manufacturing (AM) is well documented and spans both the public and private sectors. Although AM already plays a significant role in product design and prototyping, advancing the methodology for industrial applications depends on reliable inspection technology, particularly for safety-critical parts and structures.
The increasing use and interest in AM for industrial applications is being driven by potential benefits that include the possibility to customize parts and reduce weight. For most AM products, however, there is usually little experience with how these structures perform in practice versus their conventional counterparts. This uncertainty for both manufacturing and in-service monitoring creates barriers that impede adoption of AM for manufacturing applications and challenges for in-service monitoring. Overcoming these barriers requires rigorous testing under realistic conditions. Inspection methods such as computed tomography (CT) are used, particularly during development stages, but most are impractical or too expensive for large-scale industrial manufacturing compared to ultrasonic (UT) methods.