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Australian additive start-up announces partnership with Volkswagen

Additive Assurance, an Australian start-up developing quality assurance solutions for additive manufacturing, has announced a partnership with global car manufacturer Volkswagen.

Volkswagen will use the start-up’s technology to verify the quality of its printed parts, ensuring consistency between builds.

Spun out of Monash University, Additive Assurance has developed AMiRIS, an innovative technology capable of detecting and correcting variations in the 3D printing build process.

It combines hardware that observes each layer during printing with cloud-based machine learning software to generate a real-time defect map. The solution then analyses and feeds this information directly back to the operators. 

With the technology Additive Assurance aims to address inconsistent production quality in additive manufacturing, which according to the firm is currently a huge problem faced in industry.

Through the new partnership the start-up will develop a manufacturing system to suit Volkswagen’s laser powder based fusion printers, which it uses to develop and produce car components and prototypes faster, with greater flexibility and using fewer resources. This will involve a version of AMiRIS being installed on a printer at the car manufacturer's 3D printing facility in Wolfsburg, Germany.

Commenting on the partnership, Additive Assurance co-founder, Marten Jurg, said: 'Metal additive manufacturing is taking the world by storm, but quality is still not at the level it needs to be for important applications. We see a huge opportunity for additive manufacturing and are thrilled to be working with a leading company like Volkswagen to transform how they develop their products.'

Oliver Pohl, who leads the Additive Manufacturing division at Volkswagen added: 'Volkswagen is actively integrating additive manufacturing in their workflow and by adopting the pioneering solution for quality assurance from Additive Assurance, we will be able to  further push the boundaries towards serial production using additive manufacturing'.

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