What is it?
"Certification of laser powder additive manufactured components for industrial adoption in the energy and offshore sectors."
This joint industry project with The Welding Institute (TWI) brings together research and development efforts alongside real-world additive manufacturing practices to create new industry product certification guidelines - paving the way for more widespread adoption of the additive manufacturing technology.
ENGIE Lab-Laborelec and Rolls-Royce Nuclear joined the project as sponsors, supporting the development of both organisations' understanding and certification of additive manufacturing for non-aerospace applications. The JIP remains open for additional industry sponsors who will each contribute a detailed component design that will be taken from concept through to completion in the additive manufacturing process.
What are the objectives?
- Identifying the priority measurement and standard compliance challenges of the Energy and Offshore sectors.
- Undertaking certification of a range of representative parts selected by the project sponsors.
- Creating protocols that address the specific material and process needs of each sponsor.
- Setting an example framework for certification and providing valuable information and data for AM standard development across industries and research fields.
What are the benefits to sponsors?
- Certified parts that meet industrial requirements for quality, safety, and consistency, and which are qualified ready for market introduction.
- Improved knowledge of AM processes and practises to ensure repeatability and reproducibility and facilitate the certification of future parts.
- Decreased cost of certification by leveraging expert processing and certification knowledge and experience from both TWI and LR.
While there is an ISO joint working group (involving TWI and LRQA) currently developing standards for additive manufacturing, they are still several years away from the adoption stage, and there is no provision in existing standards for parts produced using additive manufacturing technologies.