The importance of a correct alignment in contactless inspection of additive manufactured parts

Nowadays products having complex freeform custom-made shapes can be fabricated without any tool by means of additive manufacturing processes. Additive manufactured parts must be inspected for quality to verify that they meet dimensional and geometrical specifications among other requirements just as any other product. Contactless inspection carried out with optical 3D scanners is preferred to traditional pointwise measurements because of the higher amount of data retrieved in short times. A key step of the contactless inspection process is the definition of the part reference frame for the alignment of scan data. This paper considers different 3-2-1 alignments and analyze their influence on the inspection results, putting in evidence that an inattentive or inaccurate definition of the part reference frame can lead to incorrect evaluations of real part deviations.