Additive manufacturing (AM) is everywhere and anywhere nowadays. Every day technical websites, and even most social media sites, are posting cool videos and new applications. 

With conventional machining of metal component parts, the interior structures are often taken for granted as solid, leaving little room for doubt about the internal quality. 

While you may be familiar with the concepts behind additive manufacturing, the inspection methods themselves may not be as well known.

Additively manufactured parts face unique testing challenges. Along with many aspects of additive manufacturing, testing and inspection of additively manufactured parts is now being studied. Last October the ASTM International Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence announced its first set of R&D projects.

Creativity—the ability to imagine things that do not exist and make them a reality—is said to be one of the things that elevates humans above other species.

Though buzzier than ever in 2019, 3D printing has existed for at least 35 years, beginning with the invention of stereolithography in 1984 and accelerating with the development of fused deposition modeling in 1988. More recently, however, additive manufacturing for series production, paired with an uptick in lower-cost metal 3D printers, has elevated the industrial 3D printing industry to previously unreachable heights.

What is Industry 4.0? This buzzword seems to have been thrown around for quite some time now. How is it affecting today’s NDT manufacturing processes compared to the past? What new technologies have risen from Industry 4.0 in the past few years to benefit NDT? To answer all these questions, it is important to look back and understand how it came to be.

On every trade show floor featuring additive manufacturing, there’s a growing selection of additive processes for making production parts that stand alongside machines more commonly associated with prototyping. An essential aspect of additive’s transition from prototyping to production is data collection.

Fabtech showcased new 3D printing technology as well as quality tools. In the smart manufacturing hub,  companies such as Microsoft, Stratasys, SLM Solutions, Desktop Metal and Memex made the case for data-driven manufacturing and described how companies can get there. As Microsoft said, “AI is ready. Are you?”

What do Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Trix, British water pipes, and a 1927 Ford Eifel have in common? They have all been digitized using professional handheld 3D scanners.