Machine vision for Industry 4.0 high-speed 3D printing

Faster, cheaper and more viable 3D metal printing for large-scale manufacturing

Challenge

While SPEE3D’s additive manufacturing process/printer can produce metal parts using metal powder cold spray, accuracy is low, requiring post-machining in a CNC mill.

Proposed Solution

The project aims to automate this process by developing 3D scanning technology, which, using image sensing, will digitally acquire the shape printed by the machine.

To characterise this data, 3D geometry processing software will be developed, providing a CAD-like representation to the CNC mill. This allows the part to be positioned for milling in a fully automated process as well as in-process sensing, which incorporates feedback to the part build software resulting in improved accuracy during manufacture.

These developments will better position SPEE3D’s technology to compete not only on speed but quality and accuracy with other internationally developed metal printing processes.