Mohsen Seifi ASTM
To accelerate the broader adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) technology, it is widely accepted and globally recognised 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.
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 organisations, ASTM and ISO signed a PSDO agreement in 2013 to jointly develop globally accepted standards for AM. This was a strategic move to effectively utilise 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 organisations (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:
• General AM standards
• Standards for feedstock materials
• AM process and equipment standards
• Standards for finished AM parts
• Application-specific standards
Recently, in order to meet the specific requirements from different industry sectors, ASTM has formed a new subcommittee to develop standards specific to applications (e.g., aviation, spaceflight, medical, transportation/ heavy machinery, maritime, oil/gas). The adoption of these standards will enable rapid qualification and certification of the AM products.
GAPS IN AM STANDARDISATION
While the standards published so far represent crucial progress, these standards alone are not enough to meet the industry’s needs. To assess remaining standards gaps and focus the effort of the community on the highest priority standards needs, the Additive Manufacturing Standardization Collaborative (AMSC), an initiative by America Makes and ANSI, developed a standardisation roadmap for AM. The roadmap identifies about 90 gaps; close to 65 of these gaps need additional prestandardisation research and development (R&D).
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A NEW CONCEPT: RESEARCH FOCUSING ON FILLING STANDARDISATION GAPS
Standard development has always been a slow process for many reasons. It is voluntary and consensus-based, and it can be time-consuming for the busy experts involved in standards development to come to agreement on complex technical details. However, considering the pace at which AM technology is maturing, the industry can’t wait years for critical standards to come out. To address this challenge, ASTM came with a unique initiative; the ASTM AM Center of Excellence (AM CoE).
The primary role of AM CoE is to initiate rapid-turnaround R&D projects that tie directly to standardisation gaps by collaborating with its partners—global leaders in AM research. The AM CoE is the first organisation in the standard development world to expedite the standardisation process by supporting research. By coupling standard development with R&D, the AM CoE can reduce the time-to-market for AM parts and materials and obtain a faster consensus for standards among the AM community with credible results from high-quality research. This has already been demonstrated through the first and 2nd rounds of AM CoE R&D projects. So far, close to 10 new standard work items have been registered and initiated by this research and are progressing rapidly via the consensus-based F42 process.
INDUSTRY-RECOGNISED EDUCATION AND TRAINING WITH A FOCUS ON UTILISATION OF AM STANDARDS
Another way to accelerate standardisation is through increasing AM community engagement in the process. To that end, the AM CoE has initiated a comprehensive education and training program that emphasises standardisation. These programmes highlight the importance of standards, address the challenges in using standards, demonstrate how standards can be used in technical protocols, and bridge the gap between standardisation and certification. To further support the development of a skilled AM workforce, the AM CoE is launching a personnel certification programme, which will kick off with an AM General Certificate course.
This course covers all the fundamental stages of the AM value chain, accompanying the instruction on each stage in the chain with up-to-date information about the applicable standards. The AM CoE will complement this effort with an ongoing series of workshops, webinars, seminars, and conferences to continue to engage and support AM community to develop their understanding of standardisation in AM.
AUTHOR BIO: Dr. Mohsen Seifi joined ASTM International in 2016 as a director of additive manufacturing (AM) programmes, in which he facilitates’ standardisation activities across all ASTM AM related technical committees, and building new partnerships as well as development of new AM standards related programmes 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 honours and awards. He is currently serving as a global director of AM programmes 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 standardisation and has conducted extensive work on the field funded by various organisations.
