Additive Manufacturing (AM) of metals is passingthe research stage and finding application in the industrialenvironment as a manufacturing technology of choice. However,the quality of products fabricated using metal AM technologycould be considered inferior when used in batch manufacturing.Quality is generally defined as conformance to specification andis inversely proportional to process variation. Variation in aprocess signifies the number of possible defects per millionopportunities in a given production. This gives rise to the needto characterize process variation to improve quality. This paperexplores the characterization of variability in laser powder bedfusion (LPBF) AM of metals to improve the quality of partproduction with specific focus on batches. It summarizes thefactors that influence the variation and discusses the tools usedto improve part quality.
Sithole et al. (Fri,) studied this question.