Advancing Additive Manufacturing With Precision Testing For Printed Aerospace Components
Additive manufacturing provides engineers with unprecedented design freedom, enabling the production of complex, bionic structures—particularly valuable in aerospace applications. However, ensuring the reliability of 3D-printed aircraft components has remained a challenge—until now.
Overcoming Safety Concerns in 3D-Printed Aerospace Parts
While 3D printing has revolutionized manufacturing, its application in aviation has faced skepticism, primarily due to stringent safety requirements. Every component installed in passenger and cargo aircraft must undergo rigorous testing to ensure reliability. A key challenge has been the inherent variability of additively manufactured parts—no two printed components are ever exactly alike. This inconsistency has made it difficult to apply conventional material test results uniformly across similar parts.
Traditional destructive testing methods are impractical due to their high resource consumption, while advanced techniques like X-ray inspection have been costly and complex. However, a breakthrough approach may soon redefine quality assurance in additive manufacturing.
Robotic Precision: A 6-Axis Testing Solution
A new non-destructive testing (NDT) method, developed within the ‘Enabl3D’ project, is set to revolutionize 3D-printed component inspection. Led by Imprintec GmbH, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Facility for Additive Production Technologies (IAPT) and Visiconsult GmbH, the project combines penetration testing, process monitoring, and micro-computed tomography to assess critical quality characteristics.
To enhance efficiency, experts from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) have introduced an automated solution—a 6-axis industrial robot integrated with a precision measurement head. This innovative system allows for rapid and repeatable quality assessments, paving the way for scalable, in-line inspection of additively manufactured parts.
Promising Results: A Leap Forward in Quality Assurance
Integrating a measurement system with a robotic arm introduces challenges, particularly in maintaining positioning accuracy and repeatability. To address this, researchers at Fraunhofer IPA conducted feasibility studies to evaluate the system’s performance in real-world applications.
Early results are highly promising: the robotic system successfully reached all designated measurement points with remarkable precision. Accuracy deviations remained within the single-digit percentage range—an impressive achievement for an emerging technology in additive manufacturing quality control.
With these advancements, automated non-destructive testing is set to become a game-changer in 3D printing for aerospace, offering a reliable and scalable solution for ensuring component integrity—without the need for costly and time-consuming destructive testing.
For more information: www.ipa.fraunhofer.de
