Toward a Digital Thread and Data Package for Metals-Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been envisioned by many as a driving factor of the next industrial revolution. Potential benefits of AM adoption include the production of low-volume, customized, complicated parts/products, supply chain efficiencies, shortened time-to-market, and environmental sustainability. Work remains, however, for AM to reach the status of a full production-ready technology. Whereas the ability to create unique 3D geometries has been generally proven, production challenges remain, including lack of (1) data manageability through information management systems, (2) traceability to promote product producibility, process repeatability, and part-to-part reproducibility, and (3) accountability through mature certification and qualification methodologies. To address these challenges in part, this paper discusses the building of data models to support the development of validation and conformance methodologies in AM. We present an AM information map that leverages informatics to facilitate part producibility, process repeatability, and part-to-part reproducibility in an AM process. We present three separate case studies to demonstrate the importance of establishing baseline data structures and part provenance through an AM digital thread.

Digital Twin-enabled Collaborative Data Management for Metal Additive Manufacturing Systems

“…To address the data interoperability issue in metal AM, Feng et al [21,22] developed an activity model for structuring process-related PBF data, by decomposing the entire PBF process (including design, process planning, fabrication, inspection and quality control) into specific activities and identifying the inputs, outputs, mechanisms and controls of each activity. Later, Kim et al [23] developed AM data models in the form of data packages (in XML format) upon the activity model. Three case studies have been conducted to demonstrate how the data models improved data manageability, traceability and accountability in the metal AM processes.…”

Analysis of General and Specific Standardization Developments in Additive Manufacturing From a Materials and Technological Approach

“…Kim et at. [19] also emphasized the difficulty of use of data through information management systems as one of the most important production challenges. Additive manufacturing technologies are widely established both in our industries and in the collective knowledge of society.…”

Determination of optimal build orientation for additive manufacturing using Muirhead mean and prioritised average operators

“…Some have anticipated that AM processes would bring revolutionary changes to the industry (Gao et al 2015). Despite this, ensuring the repeatability of AM processes and the reproducibility of AM products is still considered as one of the biggest challenges to make the processes widely applied in the real world industry (Kim et al 2017;Qin et al 2019).…”

“…To tackle this challenge, substantial work needs to be carried out at a number of aspects (e.g. design and simulation for AM, process planning for AM, qualification and certification of AM parts, standardisation of AM processes, AM materials, and AM digital thread) (Kim et al 2015(Kim et al , 2017, in which process planning is one of the most important aspects. Process planning for AM is the use of specific techniques to generate the process plans for building a part, which mainly include build orientation, support structure, 3D model slicing, and tool-path, according to the 3D model data of the part (Kulkarni et al 2000;Ahsan et al 2015;Liang 2018).…”