The application of in-situ monitoring systems for part quality verification or process qualification for laser based directed energy process will require the ability to confidently detect (or predict) type, size, and location of defects in an additive manufactured component. These developments are requested by the industry to supplement the expensive and time-consuming ex-situ inspection for part certification to support the number of viable business cases.


This confidence level of the in-situ monitoring solutions should be comparable to that of ex-situ inspection techniques (such as micro computed tomography). These developments will also require very large experimental datasets with spatially resolved in-situ monitoring signals which must be correlated to ex-situ inspection data. A crucial element in this correlation is the spatial accuracy of these signals to match with ex-situ information.


Currently, there is no consensus framework for validation of the spatial accuracy of the in-situ monitoring signal. Therefore, a method will be presented in the paper to evaluate the spatial accuracy obtainable with the typical available location information on ethernet field bus implemented in laser based directed energy process. The accuracy is verified by the implementation of a high speed imaging setup which also supports the typical application imaging solutions as a source for the in-situ monitoring signals.