Concept for Digital Twin Based Virtual Part Inspection for Additive Manufacturing

Quality assurance is one of the main challenges for additive manufacturing. In-process quality assurance measures and, in particular, part inspection after production are time-consuming and cost-intensive. Most existing quality assurance approaches were developed for traditional manufacturing technologies like milling or turning and have been optimized over the years. Due to its unique process characteristics, these approaches will not easily translate to additive manufacturing. So, a new holistic approach for quality assurance in additive manufacturing is necessary for wider dissemination of additive manufacturing in all industry sectors. The Department of Computer Integrated Design at the TU Darmstadt sees digital twins in additive manufacturing as a promising approach to tackle these problems. This paper provides a building block for digital twin-based quality assurance by proposing a concept for a virtual part inspection. In this concept, data from product development and product manufacturing are combined to make predictions about the properties of the as-built part. The concept was developed under consideration of the digital twin architecture consisting of digital master and digital shadow and is integrated into the existing process chain for additive manufacturing