Ensuring Quality in Metal Additive Manufacturing Through a V-Model Framework

Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) produces complex, part geometries from a variety of materials in powder and wire form. Due to complexities of MAM processes that create those geometries, especially powder bed fusion, quality assurance, and qualification remain an ongoing challenge. Quality assurance involves assessing the quality of a part's geometry, surface finish, and mechanical properties. Currently, quality assurance is not easily achieved due to variations in the powder inputs, the MAM process itself, and environmental factors, such as temperature. Many efforts are underway to develop a new quality system that includes 1) planning, measuring, and qualifying parts and 2) enhancing quality through a processing-monitoring-qualifying framework. Creating this new system requires building the complex relationships between requirements, processes, and quality. These relationships are needed to specify, measure, analyze, and optimize variables to ensure final part quality. Thus, a processing-monitoring-quality framework could provide critical steps to identify those relationships and help meet stakeholder needs. The paper describes how to adapt the 'software and systems engineering' V-model to a 'metal AM quality assurance' V-model that can provide a framework for quality assurance in MAM.