12/ New file format for 3D printers

2 June 2020

By Barnaby Lewis

ISO/ASTM 52915, just published, will help realize the full potential of additive manufacturing.

With the possibility to create complex shapes and make use of exotic materials, 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, has been embraced by industries from automotive to medical, as well as hobbyists and inventors. It works by depositing material in layers, building up an object from nothing except the plans on a file. Until now, that the information is encoded has relied on a stereolithography file format, or STL for short. The new standard will replace STL with the Additive Manufacturing File Format (AMF).

ISO/ASTM 52915, Specification for additive manufacturing file format (AMF) Version 1.2, published this month, was developed by the group of experts in ISO’s technical committee on additive manufacturing, ISO/TC 261^[1], in partnership with ASTM International.

Committee Chair, Professor for Manufacturing Technologies and Additive Manufacturing, Dr Christian Seidel describes some of the benefits of the new file format:

“The AMF format offers great potential to support the further development of the AM sector and will become increasingly important in the industry in the coming years. AMF describes an object in such a general way that any machine can build it to the best of its ability, and as such is technology independent.

“It is easy to implement and understand, scalable and has good performance. Crucially, it is both backwards compatible, allowing any existing STL file to be converted, and future compatible, allowing new features to be added as advances in technology warrant.”

The new jointly developed ISO/ASTM standard specifies the requirements for the preparation, display and transmission for the AMF. When prepared in a structured electronic format, strict adherence to an extensible markup language (XML) schema supports standards-compliant interoperability. It does not specify any explicit mechanisms for ensuring data integrity, electronic signatures and encryptions.

ISO/ASTM 52915 can be purchased from the ISO member in your country, or from the ISO Store.

 Source: iso.org

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