ASTM International is an international organization working to develop and integrate standards to improve public health, safety and consumer confidence. In 2018, ASTM established its Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) and, together with academics, industry and government, are carrying out research and development to accelerate the development and adoption of 3D printing technology. The organization also supports work on standardization and certification of products and technological solutions, and provides market information through Wohlers Associates, a consulting company acquired in November last year. Now ASTM, together with a group of leading companies operating in the 3D printing industry, have announced the formal launch of the Data and Material Standardization Consortium (CMDS).
The initiative will aim to bring together leading organizations from a wide variety of industries that represent the full AM value stream to work on standardizing the requirements for generating data on AM materials. In addition, members of this newly formed consortium will develop and manage reference datasets such as the one shown below for powder bed fusion (PBF) 3D printing that will help expedite the qualification and final adoption of additive manufacturing.
In addition to ASTM International, the partners who will support the implementation and main activities of the consortium are NASA and Auburn University. Additionally, 21 companies and institutions became founding members, including EOS, HP, Desktop Metal, Raytheon Technologies, Sigma Labs, AddUp, GE Additive and Boeing. These companies will work together to provide access to these important consumables datasets as well as research R2S standards to fill the standardization gaps.
The main goal of the CDMS will be to develop the important process-structure-property relationships needed to develop new manufacturing methods and generate machine-independent material data. The consortium partners will organize a material database that will be accessible to all members so that they can develop the necessary analysis to support the rapid qualification of new materials and applications in 3D printing. They will also create tools such as probabilistic and physics-based models and provide real-time quality assurance for scale 3D printing.
CMDS members, with the necessary input from regulators and other government agencies, will also identify requirements and best practices for creating datasets for 3D printing materials by identifying sources of variation, quantifying sensitivity, and establishing guidelines that can be used to evaluate the quality of existing material datasets. The consortium will also select interesting materials and certain properties, such as thermal, corrosive and static, that make the materials suitable for specific applications, and conduct projects to support the development of these datasets and standards.
CMDS members will maintain a secure member-only data management system that optimizes the material data generation workflow, which includes the Common Data Dictionary, Data Exchange Formats, and Pedigree Standards. Members have exclusive access to the material datasets developed by the initiative but in return will have to share lessons learned and research results with related ASTM committees such as Additive Manufacturing Subcommittee F42 to inform about new specifications for additive manufacturing.
Source: www.astm.org