<p>Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies—or 3D printing, as they are popularly known—show promise as a way to transform traditional production manufacturing because they can produce highly complex geometries and customized parts directly from the part design model without dedicated tooling. However, many questions about the structural integrity of 3D printed parts—tolerance limits, layer defects, residual stress, and material inclusions—remain unanswered because AM process parameters and disruptions during the material layering (generally in powder form) may induce a variety of dimensional deviations and internal flaws (e.g., cracks or voids) in the final product. These flaws might affect the performance of AM devices and create risks of potential failures, so the support of metrology and non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques for better assessment of AM parts is needed. One of the challenges to the assessment of AM parts is that many will have internal features, these are generally inaccessible from the outside to vision and contact-based inspection techniques for quality control. While destructive methods can be used to extract measurements, dimensional information from the disassembled state of a product may differ from the actual geometrical dimensions in the original assembled state. This paper describes some of the main issues associated with the measurement of AM parts and some future trends for the development of alternative techniques for measuring complex shaped AM parts. Along with a brief discussion of limitations of traditional inspection technologies, such as coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) and optical-based systems, the particular case of X-ray computed tomography (CT) as a technology to support AM inspection and development is discussed. The benefits of X-ray CT as an NDE technique for the assessment of the structural integrity of AM parts and deviations typically encountered in AM dimensional geometry when compared to reference/nominal geometry will be considered.</p>

The Role of 3d X-Ray Computed Tomography in Additive Manufacturing

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/qnde/QNDE2021/volume/85529

ASME 2021 48th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE2021)

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