On September the 12th and 13th, we welcomed Dr. Martin White, the Head of Additive Manufacturing Programs – Europe, to Plastometrex. Martin was visiting us in Cambridge for a 2-day workshop to map out a route to standardisation for Indentation Plastometry (PIP Testing), our breakthrough metal testing technology which measures stress-strain curves from a simple indentation test.

The ASTM International Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) bridges standards development with R&D to accelerate the development of standards, which makes them the ideal partner to support Plastometrex in our mission to produce a standard for PIP testing.

During the workshop, we explored the different routes towards standardisation, the supporting data that will be needed and how we maintain quality at Plastometrex. As the first step in our journey, Plastometrex will soon be releasing an ‘internal standard’ to all our customers, to ensure they are getting the highest quality data from their machines.

There was also an opportunity to show Martin our future metal testing products, including our high temperature testing stage (Hot-PIP) and our portable testing system. Standardisation of PIP testing would allow these products to be used more widely by industry and to accelerate the development of new material datasets which are currently very expensive to produce, as well as the ability to test materials in-service.

We are looking forward to working closely with Martin and the ASTM AM CoE to accelerate our standardisation journey and our work towards wide scale industrial use of PIP testing.