Practice shows that a high number of parts made with additive manufacturing technologies do not pass quality control, often requiring lengthy manual inspections. Weighing speeds up verification to make serial additive production more economical.
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Additive manufacturing methods are very common for rapid prototyping and in-house production of mounting devices. However, the technology is being applied more and more often to products that are sold to customers, making quality very important. If quality is not ensured, parts failure can cause expensive warranty work for the vendor and harm the brand image.
Quality-control costs matter
While it is possible to inspect each part after additive manufacturing, this verification is typically time consuming and expensive. To reduce costs, a producer who wants to serialize additively manufactured parts can invest in automated quality control. Choices include proven control technologies such as vision systems and similar non-contact solutions. Manual weight control or automated weight control speeds up the QC process by quickly identifying parts that must be inspected
Easy and accurate
Weight-based quality checks are easy to perform and highly accurate, offering the following advantages:
- Able to detect a cavity of 1 mm3 reliably inside a 100 x 100 x 100 mm steel cube
- Lighting conditions need not be considered (effective in complete darkness)
- Reflecting surfaces do not matter
- Product does not need to be presented in a defined position
- Internal cavities can be reliably detected without x-ray
As a result, weighing is an easy-to-apply yet very reliable quality control method.
ISO9001 / TS16949 conformity
Weighing also makes calibration, traceability and documentation easy when complying with ISO9001 or TS16949. Most weigh modules also have internal calibration weights to test their functionality and accuracy whenever necessary.