Melt pool
The small pool of molten metal under the laser or electron beam. Its size, shape and stability decide whether the layer fuses cleanly. Meltrix watches it at frame rate.
Resources
The vocabulary of the floor, and what a pilot needs.
A glossary of the defects and process terms Powdrix's agents work with, the standards the reasoning layer cites, and the inputs a floor brings to a pilot baseline. No white papers or calculators are published yet; this page is the reference we actually have.
Standards the reasoning layer cites
- AS9100: aerospace quality management
- ISO 13485: medical device quality management
- ASTM F42 and ISO 52900: additive manufacturing standards
- Your parameter sets, build and qualification specs and quality procedures
Retrieval is tenant-isolated and every answer carries its citation. Citing a standard is not a certification claim.
Glossary
Twelve terms
The defects and process terms that appear throughout the site.
Lack of fusion
Powder that did not fully melt and bond to the layer below, leaving a void. Often invisible until CT, which is why Meltrix predicts it from the in-situ signal.
Keyholing
An over-energised melt pool that collapses and traps gas, leaving a pore. A power or speed issue that shows in the melt-pool signature before it shows in the part.
Spatter
Molten droplets ejected from the melt pool that land on the bed. A sign of instability and a source of defects on later layers.
Recoat streak
A line left across the powder bed by a damaged or obstructed recoater blade. It propagates into the fused layer unless caught before the next pass.
Porosity
Voids inside the part, from gas, keyholing or lack of fusion. Measured as density against target and found by CT. Poroscan segments it.
Residual stress and distortion
Stress locked into the part by uneven heating and cooling, pulling it out of geometry during or after the build. Parttwin predicts it; Thermal-and-Distortion compensates for it.
Parameter envelope
The range of laser power, speed, hatch spacing and layer thickness the OEM and the qualification allow. Powdrix writes only inside it; leaving it requires a human.
Coupon
A test specimen printed alongside or instead of parts to validate a recipe. Coupon campaigns are the cost Parttwin is built to cut.
HIP
Hot isostatic pressing. Post-processing under heat and pressure that closes internal pores. Its cycle is part of the genealogy Postprocess-and-Heat records.
Build genealogy
The record of a build: recipe, powder lot, layer tags, melt-pool events, thermal trace, approvals, post-processing cycles, CT result and disposition.
Takt
The pace the floor must hold to meet the order plan. Yield-and-Takt balances it against machine, oven, HIP and inspection capacity.
Pilot baseline
What a floor brings to the first meeting
The inputs for a baseline agreed in writing.
About the machine
- Machine type, alloys or polymers, and the part families it runs
- Cameras, sensors, CT and metrology installed, with interfaces
- Slicer, MES or quality system and how builds are recorded
- Who approves parameter changes and who signs off qualification
About the losses
- Scrapped builds per month and machine hours lost per scrapped build
- Build-failure rate per part family
- CT review hours per build
- Coupon builds per new part family
- Idle machine time between builds and manual handling hours
- Qualification cost and non-conformance cycle time
Reading
Where to go next
The pages that explain the mechanics.
Six layers, one loop
How the floor-edge runtime, orchestrator, agents, twin and training loop fit together.
How software is allowed to touch a printer
The write path, the envelope, the audit record and the data governance.
Three labelled walk-throughs
What a pilot on melt-pool prediction, CT triage or recipe optimisation would do and measure.
Writing on additive and autonomy
The parts changed, autonomy as a dial, hit density before the build.
Typed tools, declared envelopes
The SDK and CLI design previews.
Per machine, per floor, per group
Tiers, the comparison table and the arithmetic a floor runs.
Run timeline · scenario
One scenario run, step by step
Every Powdrix run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_7c2e4b on PBF-2 · Ti-6Al-4V bracket family, 24-part build. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. Twin recipe #14 selected, one lack-of-fusion precursor at layer 1,872 cleared by a bounded power trim, CT triage in 11 minutes, 23 of 24 parts released with full genealogy and one held for review.
run_7c2e4b
PBF-2 · Ti-6Al-4V bracket family, 24-part build
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.job
SUCCEEDED
0.7 s
Floor Orchestrator · Pulled the job from AM MES: 24 Ti-6Al-4V brackets, 60 µm layers, 3,140 layers, density target 99.7%, geometry tolerance ±0.10 mm, AS9100 evidence packet required. Locked the OEM-approved parameter envelope for PBF-2.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
6 m 12 s
Part Twin · Simulated 40 candidate orientation, support and parameter recipes for thermal field, residual stress and distortion, ranked on predicted density, geometry deviation, takt and energy.
-
03
prep.release
SUCCEEDED
48 s
Prep-and-Parameter · Recipe #14 released: 32° orientation, lattice supports on two faces, laser power and speed inside the qualified envelope. Predicted distortion 0.06 mm, predicted density 99.8%.
-
04
recoat.check
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Recoat-and-Powder · Recoater image checked every layer. Powder lot L-2291 on its third reuse, humidity in window. One short-feed at layer 412 corrected with a dosing increase before the next layer fused.
-
05
melt.stabilise
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Melt-and-Layer · Melt-pool, photodiode and thermal streams fused at 120 fps. Lack-of-fusion risk rose to 0.61 on part 17 at layer 1,872 and was cleared by a 3% power trim inside the envelope within four layers.
-
06
thermal.compensate
SUCCEEDED
2 m 04 s
Thermal-and-Distortion · Interlayer temperature on the tall brackets ran 14 °C above the twin's prediction from layer 2,300. A 1.5 s interlayer dwell held the thermal field inside the predicted band through the top section.
-
07
approve.human
APPROVAL
4 m 30 s
Floor Orchestrator · Melt-and-Layer proposed a hatch-spacing change on part 17 beyond the qualified envelope. Held for the AM process engineer, who declined it and chose to flag part 17 for CT priority instead. Decision logged.
-
08
handle.depowder
SUCCEEDED
38 m
Robot-and-Handling · Plate unloaded by the handling cell on build complete, depowdered, and parts transferred to stress relief. Powder returned to the sieve with lot L-2291 reuse count incremented in genealogy.
-
09
inspect.ct
SUCCEEDED
11 m
Defect-and-Inspect · 24 CT volumes segmented for pores, cracks and lack of fusion in 11 minutes. 23 parts graded accept against the acceptance criteria. Part 17 shows a 180 µm indication at layer 1,870 and is routed to the inspector for disposition.
-
10
release.qualify
SUCCEEDED
1 m 20 s
Quality-and-Conformance · 23 parts released with the full genealogy: recipe, layer tags, melt-pool events, thermal trace, approvals, post-processing cycles and CT result. Part 17 held with a non-conformance opened. Evidence packet assembled for sign-off.
Autonomy
Four levels, set per agent and per machine
A qualified floor does not go from manual to unattended in one step. Powdrix makes the level explicit, auditable and reversible at any time, and human approval for anything that affects qualification stays mandatory until validation exists. The first release runs shadow mode, then assist mode, then graduated autonomy.
| Level | What the agent does | What the human does | Where it sits in a pilot |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 · Advisory | Predicts and recommends, with citations; nothing is written | Enters every change manually | Shadow mode on one machine, first weeks of a pilot |
| L2 · Supervised | Proposes a parameter, thermal or inspection move; it executes on approval | Approves each move in the review console | Assist mode once accuracy is measured against CT |
| L3 · Bounded | Writes inside the OEM-approved parameter envelope and per-tag limits | Approves anything that leaves the envelope or affects qualification | Graduated autonomy on low-risk loops, if the floor is satisfied |
| L4 · Unattended | Runs the envelope without prompting | Sets the envelope; reviews the shift record | Planned; only after validation on the part family |
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the melt pool
A build is thousands of layers and a day of machine time. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, CT has to be triaged in minutes, and the twin has to run before the build. Powdrix runs GPU inference at the printer edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
One Jetson node per printer for 30 to 240 fps melt-pool, layer and recoater streams with photodiode and thermal fusion. Sub-250 ms alerting and 1 to 2 s bounded recommendations are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned for multi-laser machines.
CT and vision inference
2D and 3D segmentation models for porosity, cracks, lack of fusion, surface defects and metrology comparison, served per inspection cell. Sub-15-minute CT triage per build is the design target.
Training
Defect, melt-pool-instability, build-failure and AM reasoning models trained weekly over multimodal build data, with gated promotion from shadow to assist to bounded. Dedicated capacity is planned.
Part twin
Thermal, melt-pool-proxy, residual-stress and distortion simulation for recipe ranking, plus robot-cell and queue simulation. Modulus surrogates are planned so sweeps run at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare pore, lack-of-fusion, spatter, recoat-streak and distortion scenarios generated and validated against real CT and in-situ data before promotion. 1,000 to 10,000 per qualified part family is the initial target.
Optimisation and analytics
Build nesting, fleet scheduling across machines, ovens, HIP, inspection and robots, energy windows, and GPU analytics over genealogy tables.
Robot handling and serving
Plate, powder and part handling policies trained in simulation and run on Jetson in the cell. NIM packages perception, prediction and reasoning services behind the floor orchestrator.
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions operations directors, process engineers and certification engineers ask in the first meeting.
Only inside the OEM-approved parameter envelope, only on an explicit allow-list with per-tag limits, and only at the autonomy level your floor has set. Level 1 is advisory: Powdrix predicts and recommends and a human enters everything. Design partners start there, in shadow mode. Anything that leaves the envelope or affects qualification always waits for a named approver.
Control returns to the printer's own controller and the standing recipe. Powdrix is a supervisory layer on top of the machine controls, monitoring systems and MES you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the floor to its current way of running, not to a stop.
Advisory recommendations start from the twin's physics and the part spec in the first weeks. Defect and build-failure prediction improve as layers, CT results and engineer corrections accumulate per part family. The first models are trained on existing in-situ camera data; synthetic rare-defect scenarios augment them only after validation against real CT.
Only if you choose cloud training. Parameter sets, geometry, defect libraries and process memory are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. Cross-customer learning is federated and IP-isolated and waits on written data agreements. A fully on-prem deployment is available for sensitive producers.
It is designed not to. Validated parameters never change without the sign-off your quality system requires, model changes go through change control, and every action carries model version, data lineage, approval status and qualification impact in the audit log. Powdrix does not claim AS9100 or ISO 13485 certification; assurance packages are planned for the 6 to 12 month release.
You are, as with any process change, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything that affects qualification waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the reasoning, the limits applied and the human decision.
Get started
Bring the inputs, we bring the baseline
Start with one printer or one inspection cell and one measurable baseline. A paid pilot on melt-pool and build-failure prediction, CT porosity triage or pre-build recipe optimisation shows the number before you commit further.