Additive is growing up

Real-time, in-process quality verification is the shift that turns additive manufacturing from a prototyping tool into a production one.

Good to see this. Stratasys just won a $7.8 million America Makes award to build in-situ quality assurance into its industrial FDM platforms. The aim is to capture quality data while a part is being built, not after it is finished.

That last part is the whole game.

For most of its history, additive has been judged after the fact. You build, you inspect, and you hope. That made it wonderful for prototypes and hard to trust for production, because every new part meant qualifying the process all over again.

Measuring quality as the part is made changes that. When verification happens in real time, quality stops being a gate at the end and becomes part of the process itself. That is the line between a promising technology and a production one, and it is the same lesson the dimensional measurement world learned long ago. You earn trust by verifying continuously, not by checking at the finish line.

I have spent my career on precision measurement and on closing the loop between a physical part and its digital model. Seeing real-time quality verification funded as a national manufacturing priority, for defense and aerospace no less, says a lot about where this is all heading.

Additive is growing up, and the measurement is finally moving to where the work happens.