Catching Defects in Additive Manufacturing using Altair RapidMiner AI Vision Tools

Jeffrey Chowaniec, Solution Engineer at Altair presents at the 2025 ATCx Digital Twin conference.

One of the biggest challenges in additive manufacturing is its ‘black box nature’, i.e. you rarely have the ability to analyze the quality of the product prior to its completion. The resulting financial losses due to scrap and downtime can be substantial. Penn State University has been encountering this problem in its fabrication of new acoustic liners for aircraft engines and, with the collaboration of Altair RapidMiner Senior Data Scientist Jeff Chowaniec, have solved this problem by detecting just-in-time defects using AI models on imagery of the printing process. Jeff will demonstrate how he finds defects in the printing process with just single image frames using an end-to-end, drag-and-drop solution in Altair RapidMiner’s AI Studio.