Fail, Safe
Say you make a map of a 3D printed metal and see something that could be problematic. What do you do? In basic terms, you modify the manufacturing process and then make another map of the resulting metal to see if you’ve gotten rid of the problem.
Benzing used laser 3D printing, a process that uses a laser to intelligently melt metal powder in a layer-by-layer fashion, as an example. With laser 3D printing, you can change the power of the laser, the speed at which the laser is rastered across the metal powder, the depth of the melted area, the powder diameter, and even the scanning strategy.
“Those all locally will change the material and will change the color of those maps,” he said.
