Quality Assurance of Additively Manufactured Parts

Challenges:

A growing competitive environment requires industries nowadays to bring their products into the market as quickly as possible. Many companies use additive manufacturing technology for rapid prototyping to shorten their product development process. Besides that, as the additive manufacturing technology is getting more mature, companies increasingly use it for manufacturing final products. However, it is challenging to prove to their end users that the quality of parts is reliable, especially for complex and highly customized products.

Solution:

For rapid prototyping, ATOS Q digitizes the full surface of additively manufactured parts and delivers high-quality meshes. The measuring data can be compared to the design data to check the dimensional quality of the parts. Deviation details allow for a preliminary judgment and optimization of design data at an early stage. In addition, the accurate and clean data from ATOS Q makes reverse engineering much easier. The 3D point cloud generated by ATOS Q can be used as an STL file, allowing for direct 3D printing. In this way, time-consuming CAD data creation is no longer necessary for rapid prototyping in reverse engineering.

ATOS Q plays a vital role in the entire additive manufacturing process. For example, the machining and surface finish processes that 3D printed parts go through influence the final parts. This is reflected in the full-field measuring data generated by ATOS Q. GOM’s ATOS system allows for less iterations, better process control and higher product quality.