A Proposed Digital Thread for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been explored by the automotive, aerospace and medical industries for many years but has yet to achieve wide-spread acceptance. This is partially due to the lack of standard frameworks for the exchange of data related to design, modeling, build plan, monitoring, control, and verification. Here, a unified paradigm, built on Extensible Markup language (XML) -based file formats and influenced by the ASTM F291 standard, is proposed, to record and transmit data at every stage of the AM process. This digital thread contains all essential parameters, from design to testing of metal-based AM parts while remaining accessible, traceable and extensible.