NDT for Additive Manufacturing

Recently published in Welding in the World, a Springer Nature journal, is The Modal Shop’s latest research on additive manufacturing. Efficient volumetric non-destructive testing methods for additively manufactured parts explores the challenges associated with testing metallic additively manufactured parts with traditional non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques and the benefits offered by two promising volumetric NDT methods: resonant acoustic testing (RAM) and phased array ultrasonic testing (PAUT). 

Both RAM and PAUT methods were evaluated by testing a set of test artefacts.  These artefacts included both “good” parts and parts with various defects, representative of typical defects that occur in additively manufactured parts.

NDT was shown to be an excellent method of sorting parts with and without flaws, although it was not able to determine the number or location of those flaws. Benefits of NDT include speed, cost, lack of necessary part preparation, and suitability for testing parts of many different shapes (including lattice structures and parts with surface roughness) and sizes.

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Obaton, A., Butsch, B., Carcreff, E. et al. Efficient volumetric non-destructive testing methods for additively manufactured parts. Weld World (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40194-020-00932-0