The aerospace industry is increasingly adopting metal additive manufacturing for both flight safety-critical aircraft parts and non-critical flight parts. The approach offers a shorter development cycle, which means products can be developed quicker and design changes easily incorporated. 

Discovering the underlying factors that influence compliance, product quality, production efficiency and your performance as a supplier requires greater accuracy and precision than many manufacturing metrics provide.

Multi-vari charts are a useful tool for presenting analysis of variance data in graphical form. They can identify patterns of variation, on a single chart, from many causes. 

3D builds on the proven capabilities of 2D by adding a secondary layer of data describing shape, which is essential to designing highly robust measurement systems.

In the world of automated industrial quality control and inline inspection, both 2D and 3D technology have important roles to play. In this three part blog series we will look at the strengths and limitations of each, and how combining the two creates a more complete inspection system.

Over the course of 20 years, I’ve visited hundreds of different factory floors and seen a wide variety of manufacturers implement data collection and statistical process control (SPC) solutions.