The cost of inspecting manufactured parts is too expensive, according to Lumafield co-founder and Head of Product Andreas Bastian and 3D printing consultant Peter Rogers.
Bastian and Rogers discussed the cost of part inspection on the latest episode of TCT Magazine’s Additive Insight podcast.
From their perspective, inspection tools like CT scanning have only been utilised for a select few parts and processes, such is the cost of the process. This means that many manufactured parts may not be inspected as they should, which becomes even more of a concern if parts are being 3D printed, since the processes are ‘very good at creating porosity and defects.’
“The cost of checking has been pretty astronomical. CT has only been used in a handful of very specialised processes,” said Bastian. “You find a CT system where you find an electron microscope – in a lab staffed with a bunch of guys in lab coats.”
“Not exactly sitting on the manufacturing floor,” offered Rogers.
“You’re looking at the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to get one of these systems,” added Bastian. “You have a trained operator, you have to get all this compute infrastructure because the data is massive.”
Lumafield, a Californian company working in industrial CT and AI inspection, has thus made it its goal to develop and deliver more affordable and accessible CT scanning solutions. In doing so, it has brought to market its Neptune and Triton scanning solutions, which are supplemented by its Voyager and Atlas AI software tools.
Bastian’s company is not only concerned with the cost of checking, but also the cost of confidence and the cost of not even knowing. For some manufacturers, there are billions of dollars at stake on the one hand – recalls aren’t cheap after all – and in more critical applications, the wellbeing of consumers.
“We’re trying to drive that cost of knowing to as close to zero as possible,” Bastian said. “Depending on your application, we’re driving that cost of confidence down farther and farther. The cost of not knowing can be expensive in many ways. That’s when you get recalls which can be very expensive, multi-billion-dollar ones.”
“A recall is best-case situation. If there was a massive failure and all of a sudden there, God forbid, loss of life, that’s even worse,” added Rogers. “I think that with the cost of the technology coming down, it definitely makes that cost of knowing a lot cheaper. With additive, [for example,] there’s a lot of parts that we’re looking at trying to switch out that are visually inspected every second or third flight or every second or third usage. And if you can’t visually inspect all of the different functions within that geometry, what are you going to do? It becomes a very difficult situation.”