America Makes and ANSI Release Preliminary Final Draft of Additive Manufacturing Standardization Roadmap for Public Feedback

Back in March, America Makes, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, partnered up with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to form the America Makes and ANSI Additive Manufacturing Standardization Collaborative (AMSC).  Creating industry-wide standards and specifications for a young and rapidly growing industry like additive manufacturing is no short-term project, so the AMSC’s focus hasn’t been on developing actual standards, but rather a roadmap to identify the standards needed and to coordinate a clear approach to the eventual development process.

This week, the AMSC released the preliminary final draft of the AMSC Standardization Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing (Version 1.0) to the public for review and comment. The organization plans to have the final document published in February 2017, and currently invites comments and feedback from the public about any revisions needed before publication.

Specifically, the AMSC is looking for feedback on anything in the document that needs clarification or critical revision. All comments are welcome, but the organization reserves the right to set aside feedback for a future version of the document if it cannot be addressed immediately – for example, comments about the document’s organizational structure or about issues not addressed in this draft.

The 182-page document can be downloaded here. Comments should be submitted using the provided Comment Form and emailed to amsc@ansi.org by January 11, 2017. (You can also download instructions for using the comment form here.)

The AMSC, since its formation in the spring, has been holding virtual meetings on a bi-weekly basis with the intent of facilitating the growth of the additive manufacturing industry by coordinating and accelerating standards that meet stakeholder needs. Stakeholders include industry, academia, the federal government, and standards development organizations. Through the bi-weekly meetings, the organization has focused on cataloging existing standards as well as standards in development, performing a gap analysis on the need for new or revised standards, and drafting the roadmap itself based on these considerations.

At the end of September, in America Makes’ hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, the AMSC held its second face-to-face meeting at which the roadmap’s initial draft was reviewed. The organization has been divided into eight working groups, each dedicated to a specific area of focus: design; process and materials (subdivided into precursor materials, process control, post-processing, and finished material properties); qualification and certification; nondestructive evaluation; and maintenance. The working groups convened to review the document among themselves before it was released to the public earlier this week.

“The hope is that the roadmap will be broadly adopted by the standards community and that it will facilitate a more coherent and coordinated approach to the future development of standards and specifications for additive manufacturing,” the document states. “To that end, it is envisioned that the roadmap will be widely promoted and subsequently updated over the course of the coming year, to assess progress on its implementation and to identify emerging issues that require further discussion.”

The AMSC is made up of numerous organizations spanning multiple industries affected by additive manufacturing, including aerospace and defense, education, energy, engineering and healthcare, as well as major 3D printing industry players such as 3D Systems and Stratasys. You can see a full list of the organizations participating in the AMSC here. If you’d like to sign up to participate in AMSC working groups in the future, you can do so here. Discuss in the AMSC forum at 3DPB.com.