To facilitate widespread adoption of AM, it will be necessary for material property data to be shared among the design community at large instead by being held by a few large companies.
In 2010 the ASTM F42 Committee on Additive Manufacturing (AM) created the terminology for an industry which up to then was referred to as rapid prototyping (RP). Parts made using the various rapid prototyping technologies were often used as design concept models, fit check mock-ups and function test articles. Short-run end use part applications developed where RP parts were used as patterns for the cast urethane industry, producing polymer parts with appropriate mechanical properties. Dimensional tolerances and surface finish were important, but other quality metrics were often not required. The facilities that manufactured these parts seldom held a QMS and were generally called service bureaus.
One of the earliest examples of production using RP, in 2001, were the electronics cooling ducts for the F/A-18 produced by Boeing spin-off On Demand Manufacturing (ODM), based in Camarillo, CA. These parts were produced out of nylon 11 using the technology powder bed fusion, known by trade name selective laser sintering. As a producer of aerospace production parts, it was a requirement for ODM to implement powder bed fusion into their AS9100 QMS and the era of contract manufacturing using AM began.