NIST Announces Metal 3D Printing Breakthrough Which Could Help Spur Wider Adoption

One of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of metal additive manufacturing is that we still have large gaps of understanding about what happens to the material during the process. More specifically, there are few tools which can show what happens to the internal structure of different metals as it is melted and then solidified during printing. However, this issue may be a thing of the past. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and other institutions have announced a breakthrough in the ability to predict and control the characteristics of metal 3D printed parts. This has the potential to improve the technology’s consistency, making it more feasible to adopt it for large-scale manufacturing.

This is not the first time that NIST has shown interest in metal 3D printing. Just last year, not long after the Biden Administration launched its AM Forward Initiative, the institution awarded about $3.7 million in grants to address current and future barriers to adoption of metal additive manufacturing. These projects centered on addressing topics such as determining key material properties for quality control in AM as well as establishing data-driven frameworks for nondestructive qualification of AM materials and parts. The latter especially is a topic of some consideration as AM is being increasingly adopted for even security-critical applications in various sectors. This latest breakthrough seems to be operating within the same vein.

Turning to the Past to Improve Metal AM in the Future

The news comes on the heels of another announcement from NASA that it would be further investigating ways to improve certification and qualification for metal 3D printed parts. Indeed, this trend is one that has been a long time coming. 3D printing is only gaining in popularity thanks to its benefits in terms of lower costs and lesser waste. But issues surrounding qualification and continued consistency for part properties has made even wider adoption difficult. NIST hopes that this discovery could change that, as it will grant what they consider to be an unprecedented level of mastery over metal 3D printing. And to do this, they actually turned to the past.