Diagnostic Inference in Vat Photopolymerisation: Discriminating Between Competing Defect Mechanisms Under Uncertainty

Visible defects in vat photopolymerisation are rarely unique signatures of a single mechanism. Curl, separation, weak interfaces, dimensional drift, incomplete layers and surface defects can arise from different combinations of optical, chemical, rheological, interfacial, geometric and post-processing states. Treating an observation as its own root cause creates false certainty and can make a corrective action appear successful without establishing why the failure occurred. ER-184 defines a bounded evidence architecture for diagnostic inference. It separates observation, classification, localisation, mechanism attribution, root-cause attribution and corrective-action verification, and it makes an unresolved result an acceptable scientific outcome.