On-demand high performance steel parts are a really exciting prospect and these results look impressive. One of the difficulties in adoption I see is finding w

On-demand high performance steel parts are a really exciting prospect and these results look impressive. One of the difficulties in adoption I see is finding ways to assure the process and the materials that industry will trust and adopt. Conventional procurement of exotic or high-performance/high-spec materials can typically include destructive and non-destructive testing to confirm properties at different stages in the supply chain. This is relatively straight forward if you are getting bar or plate stock. You take some bits off and test those separately knowing everything from the same mother-plate will perform the same. In an additive process, I don't know what that looks like, or what would satisfy those who need it (usually insurance companies). Do you print an extra tab onto the part, or a seperate piece in the same print run? Or is it the consumables (i.e. the metal powder) that you QA, similar to how welding consumables are QAed. Maybe a combination? Either way, it could be a while before industry adopts a standard approach to this. In a similar but different vein, Modumetal use nanolamination to get the structures they need. I've always wondered why they don't try to match to current steel specs, maybe they can't, maybe it's not a business model that would work for them. https://www.modumetal.com/ https://www.modumetal.com/