Making AM Better, Faster – Bringing Structure to a Rapidly Evolving Landscape
Uniting Government, Academia, and Industry
The ASTM Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AMCoE) was established in 2018, with NAMIC as one of five partners, tasked to bridge standards development with R&D to better enable efficient development of standards, education, and training, certification and proficiency testing programs. Our vision is to facilitate collaboration and coordination between government, academia, and industry to advance AM standardization and expand ASTM and our partners’ capabilities.
As the industry evolves in both technology and applications, the need for structured methodologies to pursue AM excellence such as in safety and quality becomes increasingly apparent. Through standards development and our programs, we seek to enhance confidence and adoption of AM globally. Today, more than 70 of ASTM’s published international standards work in unison to direct and accelerate the development of AM and its adoption globally, in all applications. With support from all stakeholders in the ecosystem and our Research to Standards (R2S) program, the standards development runway has been significantly shortened from a few years to as short as 6 months.
Qualification and Certification as AM Adoption Accelerators
Like any other manufacturing industry, confidence in manufacturing outputs can only exist through the rigorous process of understanding and controlling the entire manufacturing process, establishing process boundaries guiding acceptance of manufactured parts. Through our published international standards such as ISO/ASTM 52920:2023 – Additive manufacturing — Qualification principles — Requirements for industrial additive manufacturing processes and production sites, a process-agnostic framework for qualifying AM parts can be established, and currently forms the basis of our internationally-recognised certification programs pertaining to Quality.
The ASTM AM Facility Certification programs have been refreshed – now having 3 tiers of Quality certifications, and a Facility Safety Certification. The 3 tiers of Quality Certifications are tailored to serve different organisations using AM for a variety of objectives. Research-based organisations can pursue a process-specific quality certification: Additive Manufacturing Certification – Qualified Process (AMC-QP), while a facility-based quality certification can be attained for general AM service providers or part manufacturers: Additive Manufacturing Certification – Qualified Facility (AMC-QF). The Quality Management System-based certification is our flagship program for suppliers of AM parts to high criticality end-users and Tier 1 OEMs: Additive Manufacturing Certification – Quality System (AMC-QS).
With international standards as the foundation for qualification and certification frameworks, AM adopters can minimise uncertainties in establishing quality processes and facilities while ensuring the highest standards of safety backed by best practices of the industry developed over years of experience. Our growing base of ASTM AM Certified facilities gives us optimism that such certifications are key signals of quality and safety standards recognised by the industry. Within ASEAN, our Quality certification was first adopted by ST Engineering Land Systems, and has since been adopted by AMCen, Philippines, with other pilots taking place around Asia.
Video highlighting a recent ASTM AM Certification achievement by AMCen, Philippines
Education and Workforce Development
Our education and workforce development programs continue to deliver upskilling, cross-skilling, and re-skilling outcomes for students and professionals globally in a structured manner. Keeping pace with developments in industry, courses such as the Professional Certificate Course in AM (PCCAM) and the ASTM Certificate Course in Methods of Qualification and Certification (AMQC) in AM offer key insights and best practices in various aspects of AM, from the technologies themselves to quality assurance in production environments. In Singapore, such certificate courses are held jointly with our local partners – Singapore Polytechnic (PCCAM and Designing Additive Manufacturing’s Workplace Safety: Standards, Hazards, and Best Practices) and A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (AMQC), and have imparted AM competencies to over 100 unique individuals in Singapore alone. We have also launched the ASTM Industrial Lecture Series (ILS), giving entire organisations unlimited access to our library of recorded lectures by industry experts on a wide variety of topics in AM, such as Design, Non-Destructive Evaluation, and Feedstock. This enables knowledge transfer at scale and offers greater flexibility in pacing of learning, while also granting learners an internationally recognised Certificate of AM Competency upon completion of all lectures.
