Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference - MAMC 2023

Rapidly advancing technologies and progressive digitalisation are posing challenges to the established quality infrastructure (QI), which is the overarching system of institutions and processes to ensure the quality and safety of products and applications. In response, the key stakeholders of the German QI established the initiative QI-Digital aimed at developing new solutions for modern quality assurance. One of the central use cases herein is quality assurance in additive manufacturing, in which we establish a fully interlinked additive process chain to collect and process data from each production step, allowing for a comprehensive digital view of the physical material flow. Within this process chain, we demonstrate, test, and evolve prototypes of digital QI tools like machine readable standards and digital quality certificates. This is complemented by research on the process level, comprising the evaluation and refinement of methods for in-situ and ex-situ quality assurance, as well as algorithms for registration, reduction, and analysis of process data. Machine learning techniques support the identification of quality-relevant process data. A federated dataspace based on Gaia-X will ensure data-integrity along the process chain and enable the automated comparison of process data with requirements from digital standards, as well as the issuing and handling of digital quality reports. This paper presents the current status, goals, and vision for the QI-Digital use case in additive manufacturing, which serves as a laboratory to develop, refine and demonstrate elements of a digital QI and their interaction along the process chain.