Despite tremendous potential cost advantages, there is one very serious obstacle in the path of successful, widespread adoption of Direct Digital Manufacturing as a viable aerospace manufacturing technique: namely qualification and certification of processes, materials, and components. This roadblock to adoption is significant and dramatic. The cost implications alone of introducing a new material to aerospace, either on the airframe side or the engine side, are considerable, and the general rule of thumb is 2 years and $2M - $5M in non-recurring testing costs. Our unique approach to rapid qualification and certification combines limited and initial mechanical testing, advanced in-process sensing and process monitoring, microstructural characterization, and a statistical classification methodology that is truly multi-variate and can fuse these various inputs to result in a decision on whether or not a specific weld, deposit, or even part belongs in the same population as the nominal baseline certified parts, or is it anomalous in some way.
Benefit: The present work will not only be applicable to DDM, but to the entire area of process, product, and materials qualification and certification. Currently this entire process irrespective of what manufacturing technology is involved, is a very tedious, archaic, time-consuming, and expensive process. The area of DDM is most directly impacted, because the costs associated with switching to DDM are prohibitive if the traditional qualification and certification pathway must be used. However this is not altogether different from what is currently done when ANY process improvement is implemented, whether it is incremental or evolutionary. The re-qualification and re-certification process can be intimidating and equally costly as that for DDM. Therefore an effective solution to the qualification problem will help the entire industry at large and will extend to non-DDM manufacturing processes as well. Basically, any industry in which there are small precision lots of goods and articles being manufactured could benefit from this work.
Keywords: Certification, Certification, Rapid Insertion of New Materials, Rapid Certification, Direct Digital Manufacturing, DDM, Qualification
