Amidst the gradual scale-up of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, a consensus has started, solidified around the idea that the industry urgently needs to bring down the cost of qualifying materials and parts in order to meaningfully grow adoption.This is perhaps most relevant to metal AM processes, where the technologies are generally less proven and the materials far more expensive than on the polymer side of the industry.In contrast to that consensus, however, the industry still lacks cohesion in terms of its approach to solving that problem.
This is the role in the AM ecosystem that Phase3D is ideally suited to play: with its Fringe Inspection quality control (QC) solution, the company has designed an elegantly simple hardware solution specifically optimized for powder-based metal AM processes.Its facilitation of real-time monitoring gives it the potential to drastically bring down the cost of material inputs, and its compatibility with a variety of different processes and models means it’s the sort of product that could set a standard for the industry as a whole.Phase3D just took a major step towards that level of scalability with its newly-announced release, the Fringe Inspection M2 Series 5 Kit, specifically made for Colibrium Additive’s M2 Series 5 metal printer.
The M2 Series 5, made by the company formerly known as GE Additive, was developed deliberately for the sectors at the forefront of AM adoption — above all, aerospace and defense.According to Phase3D, the company’s participation in ASTRO America’s Actionable In-Situ Awareness Challenge helped facilitate its work on the Fringe Inspection M2 Series 5 Kit.Notably, ASTRO America is one of the collaborators in the Stifel North Atlantic AM Forward Fund, and GE Aerospace — which helped develop the M2 Series 5 and is the largest user of the machine — was one of the founding members of the AM Forward Initiative.
Image courtesy of Phase3D In a press release about Phase3D’s launch of the Fringe Inspection M2 Series 5 Kit, the founder and CEO of Phase3D, Niall O’Dowd, PhD, said, “The M2 Series 5 is a workhorse of metal [AM], and with this release, we’re giving operators the ability to see, and measure, every layer in real time.The ASTRO America Challenge, a national competition to advance in-situ monitoring for AM, gives us the opportunity to demonstrate that unit-based, actionable inspection can make AM more reliable, scalable, and cost-effective.” Phase3D has done an impressive job at an extraordinarily difficult task: working simultaneously on deep-tech R&D and commercial scalability, in a way where the two objectives accentuate rather than hinder one another.The company recently launched an online store for its quality assurance software, providing an opportunity for Fringe to reach a much wider audience.
Image courtesy of Colibrium Additive The release of the tool designed for the M2 Series 5 perfectly fits that same pattern, optimizing Phase3D’s core offering for one of the most widely used ecosystems in the vertical that’s growing its AM adoption at the fastest pace.The most compelling angle here is that, in order for aerospace and defense to maintain and increase that adoption rate, it’s going to need precisely what Phase3D brings to the table.While not everything that the defense sector does has applicability outside of its own silo, standardizing and simplifying the qualification of materials and parts is one of the things—and maybe the quintessential thing—with such broader applicability.
That is, even if you’re a metal AM company with no exposure to aerospace and defense and never plan to try to enter that market, it is still in your interest that aerospace and defense companies figure out how to make it easier and cheaper to qualify printed metal parts.Right now, aerospace and defense is probably the only vertical that can catalyze the gains in scale needed in order to propel everyone else forward.That possibility will become all the more likely when companies like Phase3D can translate those gains into products that the rest of the industry can access.
Featured image courtesy of Phase3D
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