Those working in the manufacturing industries have to rethink what it takes to safely use an additively manufactured product, according to Lumafield co-founder and Head of Product Andreas Bastian.
Speaking with additive manufacturing consultant Peter Rogers on the latest Additive Insight podcast episode, Bastian provided his assessment of 3D printed product development having worked with the technology at Lumafield and Autodesk.
At Autodesk, Bastian was involved in projects like this aviation seat frame, in which additive manufacturing was combined with traditional casting methods to design a lightweighted product. Through such endeavours, Bastian has learnt that developing real-world applications with additive manufacturing is much more difficult than proclamations such as ‘complexity is free’ might have you believe.
“In reality, in the trenches of actually trying to bring additive products to market is far more complex,” Bastian said. “To a certain extent, we have to rediscover all of the things that have been derived, say, for casting processes over the past several millennia, for CNC back to the forties or fifties, for machining, which harkens back to the early steam engine era. We have to rethink what it actually takes to safely use an additive product. It’s a lot of not particularly glamorous things like post-processing, heat treatments, post-machining.”
Rogers notes that although additive manufacturing does offer some design freedom, the technology also has its fair share of constraints and limitations, which can often be left unsaid. Though Rogers has spent much of his career in the additive manufacturing space – working at Autodesk, Velo3D and now as a consultant – he concedes that the technologies are ‘very good’ at creating porosity and defects, for example.
This brought the pair onto the focus of their conversation: making the inspection of manufactured parts more accessible. Lumafield is a company set up in a bid to address the accessibility of CT and AI inspection, bringing scan and software solutions to market at what it believes to be a more affordable price point.
For those trying to produce components with 3D printing technologies, part inspection is also paramount to ensure quality and safety.
“You can push technology to its boundaries and see where it breaks, but pre breaking point, there's also challenges,” offered Rogers. “You've got the standard distribution of values compared to where the safe zone is. You want to get close enough to create hopefully what is the best design rather than compromising the design to meet the manufacturing constraints.
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“But as you move towards the breaking point, you generally do start to see more complexities or more impurities with the actual geometry. As soon as you cover something with powder and do a next layer, you all of a sudden have a lot of stuff that you can't see and there's distortion, there's issues happening below the surface that don’t quite get picked up, which is often where we see companies running CMM technology, 3D scanning, comparing the digital twin that they've got from the original CAD.”
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Read more: 'The cost of inspecting parts has been astronomical' - Lumafield CEO Andreas Bastian
