I think SGLB will change the metal 3DP landscape.
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Prabhjot Singh... “We have a very strong materials and manufacturing group ,” Singh says. “It is helping us bring in new technology and mature it to our needs. The engineering teams we work with keep us real, and they help us develop the right kinds of technology .”
Another individual is Christine Furstross, GE Global Research Tech Dir...“We’re just learning what gives the materials the types of properties it’s achieving,” she said. “What are the things we can do in the equipment to make sure we make a material strong enough and tough enough? How do we make sure we do that every time for every part?”
http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aabndb.htm
Read what Christine Furstoss has to say about metal AM, quality, and strategic partners:
I would say that there are four factors that will truly enable Additive Manufacturing to incorporate more types of materials and more types of parts. For simplicity I’ll limit the discussion to looking at extending AM to metallic parts. As I mentioned, what’s exciting and also a challenge is that we are building up material properties at the same time we are building the geometry or the form. But, the software and the predictability of outcomes to be able to do that on a large scale just aren’t quite ready. And that’s not a surprise. In the casting industry and the forging industry it has taken decades to really be able to predict how a process leads directly to the properties you get out of the material. We are really just at the birth of that with AM. But I think with all the advances in high performance computing and a dramatic increase in the number of simulations that we can look at, we shouldn’t take decades anymore. But it is not going to be a simple path. So, that’s one of the biggest gaps that we are working on across GE and with our strategic partners.
http://www.americas.gecapital.com/GECA_Docume...l_2013.pdf
Take it as you will. As I mentioned, I don't do this kind of thing where I "read between the lines" often. But the way I interpret it, the technology from Sigma Labs is being utilized by GE in a meaningful way. What has been stated in regards to closed-loop control technology, Sigma Labs has only been the company to offer a solution. That is not to say what I've stated is the final and end-all. If anyone sees otherwise, I'm open to discussion about technology to bring process control to 3DP.