VELO3D officially launches Assure™ Quality Assurance and Control System. Designed for its Sapphire® 3D metal printers, the new product aims to deliver substantiation of part quality needed for volume production.
In a recent Opinion of the Week, when asked what’s required for metal 3DP to be viable in production, VELO3D’s Benny Buller said, while announcing the company has been working on a Quality Management System that should be released soon:
“Qualification is the primary step that needs to be ensured in a manufacturing environment, yet remains one of the most significant limitations when it comes to AM. Furthermore, AM has been slow in deploying quality control.
If you think about how a part is made via AM, it includes thousands of steps. Each of these steps is uniquely and digitally controlled. Semiconductor manufacturing, for instance, requires hundreds of manufacturing stages. The whole process can therefore take several months. To avoid realizing at the end that there was a step that raised an issue, you need to control quality at every single step of each stage.”
Through this official announcement, we now know that the QMS can detect process anomalies, flags them, and warns of the corrective actions to achieve so errors do not occur. The system integrates real-time, multi-sensor, physics-based detection algorithms, and ensures unprecedented traceability of part quality and flags process anomalies as soon as they appear. Assure™ reduces variation and comes along with detailed documentation to fast-track printed-part validation.
Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, first to experience VELO 3D’s Assure™
Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, the 3D Printing service of Stratasys is the first customer to leverage the manufacturer’s Quality Assurance and Control System. Earlier in the year, they acquire a Sapphire printer and during the testing period of the QMS, they have been able to identify variations and errors in the production of the parts on several builds.
The Stratasys team acquainted themselves with Assure’s dashboard and its different features: monitor the integrity of the builds, validate the bulk material density, observe ongoing process metrics, and verify the calibration of the system across multple production runs.
“Stratasys Direct has built a culture of continuous improvement that means we are continually setting new standards for our industry on quality,” said Kent Firestone, CEO of Stratasys Direct Manufacturing. “We integrated Assure into our quality control workflow because it produces highly actionable insights. The user interface features intuitive graphs and charts that enable us to see and interpret the vast amount of data collected during builds. This information helps our engineers verify the quality of the build each step of the way, and enables them to make quick decisions in the event of an issue. Assure helps us reduce production variation, improve yields, and circumvent anomalies to ensure consistent additive manufacturing.”
Stratasys Direct’s satisfaction at the end of this trial period, does not only prove Assure is a viable option to integrate when leveraging Sapphire® 3D metal printers, it also demonstrates that VELO3D has reached a new milestone in enabling manufacturers to “invent whatever [they] want”.
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