Sigma Labs Inc (SASI)

[porsche2006]

as seen in New Mexico local papers: must see!
Santa Fe science company joins 3-D printing revolution
The Santa Fe New Mexican
Mar 17, 2014.
By Roger Snodgrass |
In Charles Stross’ science fiction novel Singularity Sky, published in 2003, an advanced artificial intelligence makes contact with inhabitants of a backwater planet by showering cellphones from a low orbit and speaking to anybody who picks one up to listen. The message is that the visitors will provide food, cars, boats, clothing and almost anything in exchange for local information. The goods are made by something called a “cornucopia machine” — “molecular assemblers that can recreate objects from generic raw materials.” The scene is one of first attempts by a contemporary imagination to come to grips with an emerging phenomenon known as three-dimensional printing.
Thirty years ago this month, Charles Hull invented a version of 3-D printing, a technology with a growing reputation as a global game-changer. The technology’s greatest promise may lie in manufacturing, according to Terry Wohlers, an expert analyst, who calculated that 28 percent of all money spent on 3-D printing last year was used to manufacture industrial parts, up from 4 percent 10 years ago. He predicts an overall 3-D printing market of $6 billion by 2017.
Custom-made items, including human cells and organs, shoes, toys and musical instruments, as well all kinds of mass- produced parts, fittings and souvenir swag, have impressed the community of business oracles. Consultants at McKinsey & Company, among many other analysts, consider 3-D printing as a potentially transformative force in the 21st-century economy. The Economist magazine said it might unleash the “third industrial revolution.”
Hull’s patent identified “a system for generating three-dimensional objects by stereolithography.” Other variations followed, according to a National Science Foundation time line, including one introduced in 1989 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team led by Emanuel M. Sachs. This one was called “three-dimensional printing techniques” and detailed a process for binding in specific areas, layer by layer, a porous, powder-like material and then removing the unbonded powder to produce a component in the desired shape.
The various approaches to 3-D printing are known collectively as “additive manufacturing,” which got a plug from President Barrack Obama in his State of the Union address last month, when he referred to a new initiative by the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute: “3-D printing,” Obama said, “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything,”
One of the small businesses recognized in the first round of funding by the institute Obama mentioned was B6 Sigma, a subsidiary of Sigma Labs Inc. in Santa Fe. B6 Sigma gets its name from a quality control concept that aims for a standard of manufacturing perfection known as Six Sigma. The “B” stands for “beyond” six sigma, or virtually beyond perfection, according to Mark Cola, president and CEO of Sigma Labs.
The company comes to 3-D printing with experience in processing and prototyping very high-end components, but also from its dedicated experience in the area of “in-process quality control,” a manufacturing strategy that came out of the nuclear weapons manufacturing process aimed at achieving “certified” products at critical levels of assurance.
“Manufacturers are beginning to need to make and inspect their product, not in two steps, the way it is mostly done now and has been done for a long time,” Cola said about the drive for maximum efficiency. “We have patented a technique for making the production control knob and the inspection control knob one thing.”
B6 Sigma uses a computerized analysis engine that takes raw data from sensors and mines it for features that tell all about the physics going in and the geometry coming out. “We’re measuring attributes of the process — heat, power, that the bed of powder is the right thickness. It’s not just data collection; it’s in-process monitoring,” he said.
Now providing a variety of “in-process quality control” services for large manufacturers in the aerospace and defense industries, B6 Sigma is engaged in making super-efficient joining components for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and is part of an ecosystem of additive manufacturing organized by General Electric Aviation for making a very large batch of super-efficient fuel nozzles for a new fleet of next-generation engines designed to use 15 percent less fuel.
There are many challenges remaining on the way to perfecting the new 21st-century assembly line to get to one of the next goals, which Cola calls “lights-out manufacturing.” That’s where you have a room, let’s say, with a few hundred cornucopia machines working away, unattended, and you turn off the lights and go home with full confidence that everything will come out exactly right.
Contact Roger Snodgrass at [e-mail].