STANDARDS FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACT LATEST DEVELOPMEN T o accelerate the broader adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) technology, widely accepted and globally recognized standards must be developed.
AM is a rapidly growing manufacturing technology that many industry sectors have now begun using to produce end-use functional parts. Over the past few years, AM has captured tremendous interest from small, medium, and large-scale industry due to the advancement in the technology. However, the rate of adoption remains slow compared to the maturity level of the technology. Industry has been cautious about embracing AM, largely due to the lack of acceptable standards that they can rely on in moving from prototyping to industrial production at scale.
AUTHOR BIO: Dr. Mohsen Seifi joined ASTM International in 2016 as a director of additive manufacturing (AM) programs, in which he facilitates’ standardization activities across all ASTM AM related technical committees, and building new partnerships as well as development of new AM standards related programs within diverse ASTM portfolios. He has also been appointed as an adjunct assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in OH, USA. He has co-authored more than 30 peer reviewed publications and has presented more than 50 invited and keynote talks at various countries, technical meetings, industries and government agencies while also receiving a number of technical society honors and awards. He is currently serving as a global director of AM programs at ASTM International Washington DC office responsible for ASTM AM center of excellence (CoE) initiative. ASTM AM CoE has four founding partners and two strategic partners at this point with about eight different locations across the globe. He holds MS and PhD degrees from Case Western Reserve University in materials science and engineering with emphasis on metal AM qualification and standardization and has conducted extensive work on the field funded by various organizations.
Understanding the need for standards to drive AM industrialisation, ASTM International took the lead and formed the ASTM F42 Committee for Additive Manufacturing Technologies in 2009 to develop standards specific to AM. In 2011, ISO created its own committee for AM standards development, ISO/TC 261. To align the efforts of the two organizations, ASTM and ISO signed a PSDO agreement in 2013 to jointly develop globally accepted standards for AM. This was a strategic move to effectively utilize and harness the inputs from the best minds in AM, which would otherwise end up diluted across multiple overlapping initiatives. In addition to ASTM and ISO, other standard development organizations (SDOs) are also developing standards for specific domains in AM. Together, ASTM and ISO have been coordinating global efforts to develop and promote the standards most needed by the AM community by leveraging the technical expertise from more than 1,000 leading AM technology practitioners around the world. With this collaboration, around 25 standards have been published so far, and another 40+ standards are under development. These have included:
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• General AM standards • Standards for feedstock materials • AM process and equipment standards • Standards for finished AM parts • Application specific standards
