By Alex Benham Picture this: You’re lying in bed, fast asleep, when your phone rings. First you’re mad at yourself that you forgot to put the darn thing on mute, but then you pick it up and look at the caller ID. It’s your boss. Or, even worse, it’s your boss’ boss. You almost drop the phone in surprise, but immediately answer. “Listen,” a voice says in your ear. “Something’s happened.” You sit up, throwing the covers onto the floor. This can’t be good. Does this sound a little too familiar? Maybe it wasn’t at 2 in the morning. Maybe…

By Alex Benham Incredible growth has happened in the AM industry, even just in the last ten years with higher print speeds, ease of use, diversified material use, cloud connectivity, and user-friendly software.  However, many metal additive manufacturing machines today still leave operators with little to no insight into the actual manufacturing process or in-process feedback about part quality. Thus companies using direct metal 3D printing struggle with quality and reliability, especially for complex parts.   Here are just a few quality and reliability challenges that 3D metal additive manufacturing faces:

Dear Colleague, The AM industry has seen many important advancements in quality monitoring and Sigma Additive Solutions is a stronghold for consistent and unrelenting focus on delivering excellence. Here's an update about some of our most recent happenings, videos and podcasts.

Summer is on the horizon and things were definitely heating up at RAPID + TCT! It was great to see so many of you there, catch up on what you’re doing, and show you the latest with the PrintRite3D® suite. We’re looking forward to more collaborations and innovation with our products and partnerships.

By Alex Benham In my last post, we delved into the importance of process health in additive manufacturing and explored the six key reasons why process health matters. Today, I’m shifting focus to another crucial aspect of production: Machine Health. In additive manufacturing, it’s common knowledge that each machine is a unicorn…and not in a good way. The industry is flooded with various OEMs, each with various machine models that operate a little bit differently, report information a bit differently, and act to the same inputs a bit differently. These variations are found even in machines with consecutive serial numbers.…

By Alex Benham The RAPID + TCT Conference is always a highlight of our year. Held this year at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, the Sigma team showcased our PrintRite3DⓇ solution and how it contributes to machine, process, and part health. Our partner Novanta joined us in our booth to demonstrate several new production scan head features and show off their benefits to customers across the industry.

Dear Colleague, Spring is off to a great start with new collaborations and catching up with many of you at AMUG. We’re looking forward to a season of growth and connection. If you’re headed to RAPID + TCT next month, we hope to see you there. In the meantime, here’s some of our highlights from recent days.

By Alex Benham An overwhelming majority of failures in additive manufacturing happen in plain sight…if anyone was watching. However, operators cannot watch every minute of the entire build process every single time. That’s a problem that Sigma Additive Solutions has been solving for more than a decade; how to keep a reliable, and constant “eye” on the manufacturing process which can alert an operator when problems arise. Our latest answer to this problem is the PrintRite3D® Process Health Module. Using a visible or thermal camera, Process Health watches the build plane, the powder spread of the recoat, and the result…