Sigma Labs Inc (SASI)

[sallardyce1]

Good Morning Samantha,

Thank you for joining the call-in last week on 3D Printing at GE. Regarding your follow-up question around In-Process Quality Inspection/Assurance, here is some general information:

Currently we are working with a number of different companies, universities and government programs to tackle this work (as well as working closely with our Global Research scientists internal to GE). There are some commercially available options that are developing, from companies such as B6 Sigma and others...and we are working with these entities on the various tasks. These tools typically are looking at the environment in which parts are being built and they monitor various aspects of that environment, such as atmosphere, melt pool temperature, appearance of each layer, etc. As you might imagine, monitoring these items creates substantial amounts of data…and how we use this data then becomes a critical component of the process. In a perfect world, we would have feedback loops to adjust machine parameters to ‘cure’ anything that might be getting off of a pre-set parameter. Although in principle this would sound relatively easy to accomplish, in reality there are a variety of tricky aspects to effectively doing this. This is why we and others continue to work the solutions and although we have made tremendous progress, I think at least for our purposes we are still a little way off from having what I might call the ‘perfect’ solution.

Even after we feel that we have the above solidly under control, I would still argue that we will continue to post-inspect parts after the builds…for a variety of reasons. In-process inspection and feedback loops are part of the overall answer to consistent and high quality parts, but they are not the only answer. We have been working with the basic elements of these processes for well over 25 years now (lasers, powder metal, etc.) and we have deep experience with how to consistently and accurately produce high quality parts…thus we know that a complete solution consists of many steps throughout the entire lifecycle of the process.

Thank you for your interest in the subject of 3D Printing and for your question. I hope the above helps to answer it.

Best Regards,

-Greg


Greg Morris
1 Neumann Way
MD K212
Cincinnati, OH 45215
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