America Makes and ANSI Release New Draft Version of 3D Printing Standardization Roadmap for Comment and Review

Two years ago, America Makes, the national accelerator for additive manufacturing and 3D printing driven by the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), began working with the private non-profit American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop standards and specifications for the quickly growing 3D printing industry.

The two organizations formed the America Makes and ANSI Additive Manufacturing Standardization Collaborative (AMSC), a regulatory institution for the additive manufacturing industry with the goal of creating a unique roadmap to identify necessary standards, as well as coordinating and accelerating a viable approach to the eventual development process. The idea is that by developing industry-wide standards and specifications that are consistent with the needs of stakeholders, industry growth will be facilitated.

A total of four primary working groups, in the areas of design, process and materials, maintenance, and qualification and certification, were set up to write the document together, and a preliminary final draft of the AMSC Standardization Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing (Version 1.0) was released to the public for review and comment in December 2016. The completed roadmap was published in late February 2017, thanks to the over 260 individuals, from more than 150 public and private sector organizations, who actively supported the document development.

The roadmap identified 89 gaps in the current AM standards landscape, with 19 labeled high priority and 58 requiring further R&D needs.

“We now need the industry and the standards developing organizations involved in this space to come together, adopt the recommendations set forth in the roadmap, and work to achieve a coherent and coordinated suite of standards and specifications for additive manufacturing. America Makes and ANSI plan to continue to further this dialogue,” AMSC Chair Jim Williams, President of All Points Additive, said upon the document’s publication last year.

Phase 2 of the AMSC standardization roadmap project began in September, and the institution’s working groups have been updating the document during regular virtual meetings since then. The groups have been validating any progress being completed to address the identified gaps, as well as looking to identify any other gaps that may have been overlooked the first time around. Additionally, a polymers working group has expanded the document’s polymer-related content, while a medical working group has refined it from the medical community’s point of view.

Now, America Makes and ANSI have released a preliminary final draft of the AMSC Standardization Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing (Version 2.0).

The Executive Summary of the document reads, “This Standardization Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing, Version 2.0 is an update to version 1.0 of this document published in February 2017. It identifies existing standards and standards in development, assesses gaps, and makes recommendations for priority areas where there is a perceived need for additional standardization and/or pre-standardization research and development. The focus is the industrial additive manufacturing market, especially for aerospace, defense, and medical applications.”

The 260-page draft, which is currently available for download, has been released for the purpose of public review and comment, with final publication planned for this June.

The Executive Summary continues, “As with the earlier version of this document, 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.”

All comments are welcome, though comments which represent critical revisions and/or necessary clarifications to the document are specifically invited. The AMSC also reserves the right to hold disposition of comments in reserve for future versions if they can’t be addressed by June.

You can submit a comment on the draft roadmap here – please note that if you’re prompted for credentials, just hit ‘Cancel’ until it lets you through; instructions for using the required Comment Form can be found here.  All comments must be submitted to amsc@ansi.org by May 3rd, 2018.

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