I-Corps: Manufacturing Visualization and Analysis

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

Markets for 3D printers and related materials are expanding rapidly, with the potential to fundamentally transform manufacturing practices. The proposed project will offer the 3D printing community a low cost, mobile-friendly solution for quality analysis of parts made by additive manufacturing. Understanding the inevitable variations between design and production is an important step in process improvement and innovation. This I-Corps team is creating an open source software system to compare scans of 3D printed objects with their digital designs, presenting the results in a visually rich, interactive form on mobile devices. Current offerings focus on expensive proprietary software and hardware, limiting participation and technical contributions by a vibrant and rapidly changing community. This team's open source solution is designed to connect users throughout the 3D printing world and use their experiences to grow better and more innovative technologies and techniques through quality analysis. The product will provide a powerful tool for evaluation to small companies, researchers, and members of the growing maker community. The proposed project adds statistical measures and a workflow derived from X-ray tomography to an existing open source visualization app that runs on handheld tablets and smartphones. The goal is to compare the digital form of the 3D model as sent to the 3D printer with a 3D measurement of the actual printed object as obtained with available scanning technology. A quantitative comparison of a design's digital model with the point-cloud or surface data generated by one of these scans can reveal important qualitative results. The product will display results based on the type and precision of the scanning technology used, such as laser-based metrology scans, X-ray and CT scans, and physical metrology systems. The statistical workflow and visualization software will be tabulated and rendered on a workstation or server, and presented using a version of Kitware's KiwiViewer that the team has customized for the application. The proposed system will be distributed open source, providing quality analysis to growing numbers of small companies, researchers, and artisans, delivered to mobile devices and desktops alike. A vibrant open source community in a rapidly changing field like 3D printing can drive a great deal of technical and market innovation. While the scope of the current project is to demonstrate existing quality examination techniques in a highly usable form, the potential exists to utilize the community's experiences to explore and improve numerous materials, techniques, and aspects of structure used in additive manufacturing.