ASTM publishes guide on certifying 3D printed parts for defence

ASTM International’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) has published a free guide for qualifying and certifying 3D printed parts for defence. 

The 'Strategic Guide to Certification of Additively Manufactured Parts in Defence Applications' was funded by and developed to support the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Project TAMPA, but aims to provide a criticality-based, technology agnostic resource for qualifying additively manufactured parts across global defence supply chains and allied partners.

"Additive manufacturing earns a place in defence only when a part can be trusted in service, and that trust depends on qualification and certification that hold up consistently across organisations, domains, and borders," says Mohsen Seifi, Ph.D., ASTM International’s vice president of global advanced manufacturing. "This guide gives manufacturers and authorities across the global defence community a shared, criticality-based reference point."

The guide is described as 'a signposting resource rather than a standard or regulation' and sets out guidance for air, land, and maritime environments across AM processes and material families. It provides a four-tier part classification which links expected certification evidence to a part’s safety criticality, plus two certification courses of action, including one based on process qualification and another on testing. The guide also covers evidence expectations across the core certification activities, including feedstock control, machine and process qualification, and product verification and non-destructive evaluation.

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Project TAMPA, which is the UK MOD's AM accelerator program, identified inconsistent part certification as one of the central barriers to scaling AM across defence. ASTM says this guide aims to unify certification expectations for AM parts into a singular reference point that ties the level of certification evidence to the consequence of a part’s failure in service, rather than prescribing new requirements. The guide specifically represents pre-standardisation work, and ASTM says should any of its concepts advance toward formal standardisation, that work would proceed independently through ASTM’s open, consensus-based process.

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