Designing offline inspection strategies for Selective Laser Melting Additive Manufacturing processes

Designing quality inspections has become essential for organizations to provide consumers with high quality products and withstand the competition. When dealing with short-run productions, such as Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes, designing inspections may be problematic due to the non-applicability of traditional statistical approaches. This work contributes to the existing knowledge of short-run productions by providing a general methodology to select the best effective and affordable offline inspection strategy when in-process controls are not suitable or not easy to be performed. The research question addressed is how to choose the most effective and affordable offline inspection strategy for a short-run AM production. The method is based on the formulation of a probabilistic model for defects prediction and on the definition of two practical indicators. This approach is finally applied to a real short-run manufacturing process of parts produced by Selective Laser Melting (SLM).