By Alex Benham Picture this: You’re lying in bed, fast asleep, when your phone rings.…

Additive Manufacturing Just Got Better!
by Ron Fisher, Vice President of Business Development Sigma Labs
I am writing this from the Additive Manufacturing User Group (AMUG) conference in Orlando. It’s great to see so many of our customers, partners, and industry contacts in person. The conversations at our booth and on the show floor are interesting and enjoyable. We are also seeing great receptivity to our newest version of PrintRite3D®. We just announced Version 7.0 last week and are pleased to see the buzz that the press release and our industry communications have generated.
So why do we believe that “additive manufacturing just got better”? It’s because of the many new features and upgrades that we added to the system due to input from customers, partners, universities, and standards organizations. One of the guiding principles of our company is to practice what we call “radical collaboration” and we believe the new version of PrintRite3D reflects this, with features like:
- Temperature Monitoring and Calibration, including a cooling rate metric and units/traceability for TEP to Celsius/Kelvin conversion.
- Neural Net Machine Learning Recoater Interaction Detection, that allows users to automatically spot recoater interaction detection with higher diagnostic accuracy.
- User Facing Machine Learning Predictive Models, allowing testing and training of new users on in-process quality monitoring to correlate in-process anomalies to post-process NDT defects.
- Multi-Laser Quality Metrics, to monitor and alert users when lasers are coming into close contact and interacting.
- Production Framework, for visualizing reference data and enabling statistical analysis of anomalies to detect build process trends and deviations.
- 3D Visualization Diagnostics, provides usability enhancements and rapid cross-section analysis, and easy comparison to CT.
- User Roles and Login, data visualization authentication access for enhanced security.
By the way, it’s not just our Sigma Labs team that has good things to say about version 7.0. Here are a few quotes from industry leaders about our new release:
“Sigma Labs combines the control and flexibility of our MCP platform with the most advanced quality assurance system. This will help standardize the AM process and quality control by providing MCP owners full access to the new capabilities of Printrite3D,” said Bart Van der Schueren, Executive VP & CTO, Materialise NV.
“PrintRite3D 7.0 allows organizations to improve process qualification and certification. The ability to monitor the actual temperature will lead to enhanced industry adoption of AM technologies,” said Peter Lindecke, Head of Quality Assurance & Qualification Team, Fraunhofer-Einrichtung für Additive Produktionstechnologien IAPT.
“The newest version of PrintRite3D provides unique benefits to the industry. The temperature monitoring, machine learning, and predictive modeling capabilities will lead to further confidence in the industrial adoption of AM technologies,” said Dr. Ben Dutton, Principal Research Engineer – NDT, The MTC Limited – Manufacturing Technology Centre.
“PrintRite3D 7.0 is a very important release as it provides a competitive advantage for our customers. They can access calibrated melt pool temperature and monitor the cooling rate which means higher quality mission critical parts,” said Dr.-Eng. Guido Adam, Head of Design, DMG MORI Additive GmbH.
If you would like to see what the excitement is all about, please join us for our online webinar on Thursday, May 13. You can register here. Don’t worry if you see this after the live event, you will still be able to view the replay. You can also learn more about PrintRite3D 7.0 here.