International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing 2023

Before advanced manufacturing technologies can be fully implemented in safety-critical applications, a clear understanding of the entire process chain and their connectivity must be established. ICAM 2023 will be the largest ASTM International scientific conference and intended to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and to transition the research to applications, focusing on the need for industry-specific standards and design principles as well as challenges with qualification and certification.

The first event of this conferenced was offered in 2016 as a workshop focused on fatigue and fractured of additively manufactured materials and parts, which evolved in a symposium in 2017. After the creation of ASTM International Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) in 2018 and the growth of the additive manufacturing industry, the 5th event in 2020 turned to a major conference, the ASTM International Conference on Additive Manufacturing (ICAM) and included 19 symposia and 10 panels. The most recent conference, ICAM 2022, was held in Orlando, FL with over 850 participants, 27 symposia, 9 panel discussions, 4 keynote addresses and a keynote panel discussion. The ICAM goal is to transition of research to application through standardization.

Acknowledging the major role of additive manufacturing processes within the advanced manufacturing field, several new topics and symposia have been added over time, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, security, simulation and digital twin, automation and robotics, and more. Accordingly, the ASTM International Conference on Additive Manufacturing will be offered as the ASTM International Conference on Advanced Manufacturing (still ICAM) starting in 2023. This is an exiting transition to widen the scope of the conference to cover more advanced manufacturing technologies.

This year’s event, ICAM 2023, will have a broader scope related to standardization, qualification, and certification of advanced manufacturing processes. This event will involve even more ASTM committees and external stakeholders, setting the stage to bring experts from around the world to exchange the latest developments in the field of additive and advanced manufacturing towards the 4th industrial revolution. We invite the entire community to join us for the exchange of ideas, to learn about the most recent advancements in the field, to be a part of the journey for transitioning research to application through standardization, and to enjoy a lot of attractions that Washington DC offers.

The automotive transportation/heavy machinery industry continues to advance the use of additive manufacturing through a wide variety of manufacturing technologies and materials. The transportation industry looks to AM to enable benefits through redesign of existing components as well as part consolidation, in order to improve cost, performance, and lead time. Successful implementations have focused on the ability of AM to enable low volume solutions, but high-volume production remains a challenge. Barriers to adoption include the cost of AM production tied to large capital investment and low AM build rates, the need for suitable and cost effective materials, and a lack of data and standards to facilitate adoption with confidence in quality assurance compounds these concerns.

The aerospace industry is one of the primary sectors which leverages additive manufacturing to its fullest extent. Cost savings, weight reduction, functional improvements and schedule optimization are the key drivers, which can be achieved by redesigning many existing components, new design concepts and through part consolidation. New materials with superior or similar properties, capable process controls and process stability, and novel design methodologies are the key enablers. However, related standards, as well as qualification and certification (Q&C) practices may need to be reevaluated/updated for additively manufactured products.

Additive manufacturing feedstocks are available for a broad range of material types and in various forms, including powder, wire, filament, inks, etc. New offerings are continuously introduced to the market with varied and unique characteristics. In some cases, all of the critical feedstock characteristics which significantly impact the quality of each process step are not fully understood quantitatively. Therefore, a proper understanding of AM feedstock characteristics and key variables contributing to their performance can be essential for production of AM parts with repeatable quality. New characterization methods, acceptance criteria, and standards are to be developed for the complete characterization of the feedstock materials.

Additive manufacturing enables modernization and more capable defense systems through the fabrication of highly optimized and complex parts. It also enables improved readiness by providing an alternative route to manufacturing hard to source spare parts and parts at the point of need, e.g. by battle damage repair or temporary spare parts manufactured onsite. Because of this, the defense industry has taken a lead in advancing and maturing this technology. However, the existing commercial standards, military standards, airworthiness standards, and certification practices may be difficult to apply or are not relevant to AM parts. Thus, new standards and practices need to be developed to facilitate broader and more rapid adoption.

Space flight is a unique industry which utilizes additive manufacturing to its fullest potential, often resulting in geometrically complex and integrated designs that only can be fulfilled by AM. Along with structural integrity, new materials, novel designs and advanced post processing techniques are key enablers. Yet, standards, qualification and certification practices require updates for AM products for space applications.

This new symposium focuses on progress in additively-manufactured non-metallic materials with emphasis on the latest advancements with reference to mechanical performance and novel applications and use cases. Symposium topics include ceramics, composites, polymer, electronics, and more. In addition, this symposium will highlight the maturation of additive manufacturing technologies and processes with these non-metallic materials and how they work together to produce complex geometries with suitable structural and functional properties.

Additive manufacturing in construction has made the headlines in many news channels, both AM specific and mainstream, with different governments putting resources into R&D with the objective to improve efficiency through reduced manpower, cost, and lead time. Besides revolutionizing how structures are built on earth, as humanity once again looks to the stars, many also see AM as ideally suited for construction on the Moon and Mars. This symposium aims to explore the current state of the art in development of AM techniques for construction across the globe with a focus on what is realistic now and what is a future possibility.

The pace of AM technology diffusion and maturity varies across different industry verticals. As compared to the aerospace, automotive, and medical, the adoption of additive manufacturing in the energy, maritime, and oil & gas industries has been moderate and is still very nascent. However, these sectors are aggressively exploring the potential of using additive manufacturing to improve operational efficiency. Many stakeholders in energy, maritime, and oil & gas have already demonstrated the capability of using additive manufacturing to produce key components, which has triggered increased interest within these industries.

The medical industry is one of the key sectors to take advantage of additive manufacturing technology. AM’s unique capability to design and rapidly fabricate complex geometries using a diverse array of materials has enabled the ever-growing adoption of this technology in biomedical applications. Despite the tremendous opportunities that AM offers in manufacturing patient-specific biomedical devices with custom and complex designs in orthopedic devices, the full potential of AM to serve the medical sector has not been fully explored. Advancements in regenerative medicine, medical device fabrication, and surgical planning is enabling a broader adoption of AM in the critical medical industry. In addition, special attention is required for standardization, qualification and certification protocols of these products.

Coming soon!

Directed energy deposition (DED) processes offer many unique capabilities for component manufacturing and repair applications. Many industries, including aerospace, energy, mining, and construction, have begun realizing the benefits of these processes in recent years, while other industries are still in the nascent stages of adoption.

In a relatively short time, additive manufacturing has developed from a prototyping tool to an industrial-scale manufacturing platform. Alongside this growth, and broader technology developments, there has been increasing importance and significant progress in the areas of sustainability and economics.

Additive manufacturing has evolved over the past decade and research has primarily focused on the evaluation of microstructure characterization and mechanical performance with limited emphasis on environmentally induced degradation modes. However, understanding environmental effects (e.g., corrosion, decomposition, stress corrosion cracking, etc.) on additively manufactured alloys is critical to enable use in structural components for engineering applications.

The rapid adoption of additive manufacturing across numerous industry sectors with a wide variety of applications requires methodologies for the characterization and mitigation of risk arising from material flaws. For safety-critical applications, it is particularly important to understand how material characteristics and process defects typical to AM (e.g., pores, lack of fusion, surface roughness, etc.) affect component integrity. Understanding these effects is complicated by the lack of historical data, the potential for variability in AM processes, and the rapid evolution of the technology. The qualification, certification, and safe continued use of AM products in fatigue-critical applications will depend not only on a basic understanding of damage mechanisms and the associated behavior of typical AM defects, but also on the development of robust, validated models and software for predicting fatigue life and fracture risk.

In order to produce end-use parts, additive manufacturing involves many pre-processing and post-processing steps, that are required to be safe and under control. These, sometimes non-obvious, steps result from different auxiliary requirements that are not always in the mainstream discussion.

The rapid advancement of additive manufacturing technologies and increased adoption of the technologies in industry have coincided with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI & ML) in the mainstream. A massive amount of data is being generated in AM from various steps of the AM process, including design, process planning, building, in-situ monitoring, post-processing, inspection, characterization, and testing, as well as operation performance, during the service life of the component. Further, a high number of parameters are being defined for monitoring and control of AM processes. Both data and parameters make AM a great candidate for AI and ML applications. The objective of applying AI & ML is to better understand underlying physical phenomena in AM and fine tune the AM processes.

Additive manufacturing presents us with a unique opportunity of generating massive amounts of data from various steps of the AM process, including design, process planning, building, in-situ monitoring, post-processing, inspection, characterization, and testing, as well as operation performance, during the service life of the component. While such data can be used to better understand key process variables (KPVs) and support decision making, it simultaneously presents a big data management challenge. Methods of AM data labeling, acquisition, storage, analysis, security, and sharing are yet to be fully explored. While many companies have developed internal procedures to address the above challenges, the AM community would benefit from standards and best practices that are widely accepted and available to the general public, particularly small and medium size enterprises (SMEs).

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are the latest evolution of the CAD/CAM breakthroughs of the last few decades. They have enabled innovation and speed to market though faster prototyping and optimized part geometries. Combining robotics and automation with AM processes is unlocking new production capabilities and scale. Our challenge now is to bring this technology to the production line increasing production efficiency, reducing cost per part produced, and enhancing safety. This symposium will bring together experts from robotics, automation, and additive manufacturing to talk through these challenges, share new capabilities, and propose strategies to take the next step.

Advancing towards the vision of Industry 4.0, information sharing via a distributed manufacturing framework internally in an organization and over the global internet becomes increasingly utilized with additive manufacturing. AM is a direct digital manufacturing method, and as the AM equipment becomes more closely interconnected with other components of Industry 4.0, it becomes exposed to a variety of cyber- and cyber-physical attacks. Therefore, security of AM should be addressed in a holistic manner. This includes but is not limited to identifying cyber-security threats in AM and how they can be addressed, to ensure and support the advancing of manufacturing to a whole new level. This symposium explores specific security aspects for AM in an Industry 4.0 environment.

Established testing standards exist for deriving different mechanical properties; however, it has become clear that conventional procedures may not always be applicable to additive manufactured materials due to the nature of the additive fabrication process. Additionally, unique mechanical characteristics and property dependence often exist under different conditions such as geometry, process parameters and post-process procedures.

Key performance metrics and characteristic properties of additively manufactured components are often different from their conventionally manufactured counterparts, owing to AM materials’ distinctive microstructural features (e.g., strong texture, columnar grains, etc.) and possible process induced defects (e.g. lack of fusion/pores, cracks, surface features, etc.). These characteristics arise because of processing conditions unique to AM, such as layer-wise fabrication and exceptionally high cooling rates. It is therefore important to explore the various microstructural characteristics of AM materials and their impact on properties via experiments, models and simulations.

This new symposium focuses on recent advances in modeling and simulation that support qualification and certification of higher criticality parts built by an AM process, e.g., powder-bed fusion, direct energy deposition, etc. Here, we will focus on state-of-the-art models and simulations that are firmly in the middle of the technical readiness scale and that represent the applied technologies that will enable industry and government to have confidence in AM components. To build credibility for their models and simulations, researchers should invoke best practices, including verification, validation, uncertainty quantification, uncertainty reduction, sensitivity studies, and demonstration problems. Symposium topics include probabilistic methods, integrated computational materials science, digital twins, process modeling, machine learning/artificial intelligence, surrogate modeling, and insights gained from simulation ensembles.

While destructive evaluation methods such as mechanical testing and microstructural characterizations are often used to evaluate mechanical performance of additive manufacturing materials and parts, nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods can provide significant insights without the need for sectioning and damaging the part. Due to the fact that the mechanical performance of AM parts is often significantly influenced by the presence of defects (i.e., pores, lack of fusion, surface roughness, etc.), understanding the critical characteristics, such as type, size, distribution, and location is key to managing performance expectations and qualification.

As the field of additive manufacturing quickly evolves, in-process control and in-situ monitoring become more essential, as the fusion process could significantly impact quality of AM parts. The AM community recognizes that more integrated efforts to accelerate the standardization of in-situ monitoring can play a significant role in advancing AM.

The interest in sinter-based additive manufacturing processes continues to rapidly grow with the promise of enabling new applications by significantly reducing production costs. Sinter-based AM processes now include Binder Jetting (BJT), Material Extrusion (MEX), Material Jetting (MJT) and Vat Photopolymerization (VPP) technologies. Unique In these processes, powder material is bound together with a binding agent during the printing process, commonly referred to as a “green” or “brown” part. Secondary debinding and sintering steps are required to remove the binding agent and consolidate the powder material to the desired final density. While the potential is high, there are many challenges involved in these processes.

Graduate and undergraduate students are invited by ASTM Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) to participate in the student presentation competition. Student presentations will be judged by a select group of Scientific Organizing Committee members and the first, second, and third place winners will be announced during ICAM and presented with plaques and cash prizes.