Phase3D is contributing its Fringe Inspection™ in-situ monitoring technology to a new America Makes initiative aimed at rewriting how metal 3D printers get qualified for production. The Delta Qual 2.0 Project Call, managed by the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), awarded $9 million in total funding to its winning teams, and the project pairs Phase3D with ATI Materials, EOS, and Laboratory Testing Inc. (LTI) under ATI's lead.
Qualifying a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) machine after maintenance or a subsystem swap currently takes two to three months, according to the project team, and typically requires a dedicated qualification build plus destructive testing every time. The Delta Qual 2.0 team wants to replace that cycle with a measurement-based workflow that judges machine health from production data instead.
What's new here is the measurement layer Phase3D brings to the table. Fringe Inspection uses Digital Fringe Projection to generate calibrated, quantitative height maps of every layer as a part builds, a step up from the camera-based systems most LPBF machines use today, which only produce qualitative images. The system will run on EOS metal additive manufacturing machines, with layer data synchronized against machine diagnostics and process telemetry to establish correlations between machine condition, in-process signatures, and final part quality. Engineers who requalify LPBF systems after routine maintenance stand to benefit most, since the goal is to substitute ongoing sensor data for the current cycle of dedicated qualification builds.
Lockheed Martin, L3Harris Technologies, and Fluor Marine Propulsion are named as transition partners, tasked with moving whatever qualification methodology comes out of the project into actual defense and industrial production lines. "It's incredible to be selected for such a high profile project to address some of the nation's biggest challenges in regards to advanced manufacturing," said Niall O'Dowd of Phase3D. The ATI-led effort is one of several projects that split America Makes' $9 million Delta Qual 2.0 award, and no completion timeline for the resulting qualification workflow has been published.
