Interspectral
“There is no lack of data” in additive manufacturing, according to Interspectral CEO Isabelle Hachette, but rather “a lack of good tools to visualise, understand, and gain insights from the data that has been generated during the full process.”
Hachette made the comments on a recent episode of TCT Magazine’s Additive Insight podcast during a conversation about the unique challenges that 3D printing technologies face around quality and inspection.
Speaking about the company's entry onto the additive manufacturing market, Hachette said, "We provide a unique value to quality assurance and process monitoring because we have developed our proprietary algorithms before we entered into this market. These proprietary algorithms can read, visualise and analyse big and complex data in a very efficient way."
Interspectral is a Swedish technology company which specialises in 3D visualisation and data fusion and has developed its AM Explorer software to deliver monitoring and analysis of process data for metal 3D printing. Having arrived in additive manufacturing via a research project within the scientific visualisation industry, Interspectral says its software tools and algorithms can efficiently read, visualise and draw conclusions from additive manufacturing process data.
“We entered the additive manufacturing industry because we saw that there was a high demand for our technology, specifically to enable serial production in additive manufacturing, and [through] this research project and the industrial cooperation that we had in Sweden, we discovered that there was a lot of data that was measured and acquired in the production process," Hachette told TCT. "We also discovered that there was no standardised way of handling the data in an efficient way, and many times the data could consist of several terabytes and that made it difficult to use the technology in a larger scale.”
The company recently announced it had secured investment from Swedish industrial innovation and deep tech investor, Navigare Ventures, which it says will enable it to ‘push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and digital twin technology.’
Elaborating on Interspectral’s use of AI, Hachette said, “The proprietary technology of Interspectral from the beginning was very much about handling large data, visualising large data in an efficient way. Now we are complementing that technology with AI-driven technologies. The AI component that we are developing is actually for optimising the error detection in the build job, for example, so that we can automate, and make it easier for the end user to use additive manufacturing in production.”