In-situ surface porosity prediction in DED (directed energy deposition) printed SS316L parts using multimodal sensor fusion

This study aims to relate the time-frequency patterns of acoustic emission (AE) and other multi-modal sensor data collected in a hybrid directed energy deposition (DED) process to the pore formations at high spatial (0.5 mm) and time (< 1ms) resolutions. Adapting an explainable AI method in LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations), certain high-frequency waveform signatures of AE are to be attributed to two major pathways for pore formation in a DED process, namely, spatter events and insufficient fusion between adjacent printing tracks from low heat input. This approach opens an exciting possibility to predict, in real-time, the presence of a pore in every voxel (0.5 mm in size) as they are printed, a major leap forward compared to prior efforts. Synchronized multimodal sensor data including force, AE, vibration and temperature were gathered while an SS316L material sample was printed and subsequently machined. A deep convolution neural network classifier was used to identify the presence of pores on a voxel surface based on time-frequency patterns (spectrograms) of the sensor data collected during the process chain. The results suggest signals collected during DED were more sensitive compared to those from machining for detecting porosity in voxels (classification test accuracy of 87%). The underlying explanations drawn from LIME analysis suggests that energy captured in high frequency AE waveforms are 33% lower for porous voxels indicating a relatively lower laser-material interaction in the melt pool, and hence insufficient fusion and poor overlap between adjacent printing tracks. The porous voxels for which spatter events were prevalent during printing had about 27% higher energy contents in the high frequency AE band compared to other porous voxels. These signatures from AE signal can further the understanding of pore formation from spatter and insufficient fusion

Process monitoring and machine learning for defect detection in laser-based metal additive manufacturing

Over the past several decades, metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) has transitioned from a rapid prototyping method to a viable manufacturing tool. AM technologies can produce parts on-demand, repair damaged components, and provide an increased freedom of design not previously attainable by traditional manufacturing techniques. The increasing maturation of metal AM is attracting high-value industries to directly produce components for use in aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and energy fields. Two leading processes for metal part production are Powder Bed Fusion with laser beam (PBF-LB/M) and Directed Energy Deposition with laser beam (DED-LB/M). Despite the many advances made with these technologies, the highly dynamic nature of the process frequently results in the formation of defects. These technologies are also notoriously difficult to control, and the existing machines do not offer closed loop control. In the present work, the application of various Machine Learning (ML) approaches and in-situ monitoring technologies for the purpose of defect detection are reviewed. The potential of these methods for enabling process control implementation is discussed. We provide a critical review of trends in the usage of data structures and ML algorithms and compare the capabilities of different sensing technologies and their application to monitoring tasks in laser metal AM. The future direction of this field is then discussed, and recommendations for further research are provided

Laser powder bed additive manufacturing: A review on the four drivers for an online control

Online control of Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes appears to be the next challenge in the transition toward Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Although many efforts have been dedicated by industry and research in the last decades, there remains substantial room for improvement. Additionally, the existing scientific literature lacks a wide-ranging identification and classification of the primary drivers that enable online control of AM processes. This article focuses on online control of one of the most industrially widespread AM processes: metal Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF), with particular emphasis on two subcategories, namely Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Selective Laser Melting (SLM). Through a systematic literature review, this article initially identified over 200 manuscripts. The search was conducted utilizing a defined research query within the Scopus database, double checked on Scholar. The results were refined through multiple phases of inclusion/exclusion criteria, culminating in the selection of 95 pertinent papers. This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of four identified drivers i) Online controllable input parameters, ii) Online observable output signatures, iii) Online sensing techniques, iv) Online feedback strategies, adopted from the general Deming control loop Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Ultimately, this article delves into the challenges and prospects inherent in the online control of metal L-PBF

Process Monitoring and Uncertainty Quantification for Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing

Metal Additive manufacturing (AM) such as Laser Powder-Bed Fusion (LPBF) processes offer new opportunities for building parts with geometries and features that other traditional processes cannot match. At the same time, LPBF imposes new challenges on practitioners. These challenges include high complexity of simulating the AM process, anisotropic mechanical properties, need for new monitoring methods. Part of this Dissertation develops a new method for layerwise anomaly detection during for LPBF. The method uses high-speed thermal imaging to capture melt pool temperature and is composed of a procedure utilizing spatial statistics and machine learning. Another parts of this Dissertation solves problems for efficient use of computer simulation models. Simulation models are vital for accelerated development of LPBF because we can integrate multiple computer simulation models at different scales to optimize the process prior to the part fabrication. This integration of computer models often happens in a hierarchical fashion and final model predicts the behavior of the most important Quantity of Interest (QoI). Once all the models are coupled, a system of models is created for which a formal Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is needed to calibrate the unknown model parameters and analyze the discrepancy between the models and the real-world in order to identify regions of missing physics. This dissertation presents a framework for UQ of LPBF models with the following features: (1) models have multiple outputs instead of a single output, (2) models are coupled using the input and output variables that they share, and (3) models can have partially unobservable outputs for which no experimental data are present. This work proposes using Gaussian process (GP) and Bayesian networks (BN) as the main tool for handling UQ for a system of computer models with the aforementioned properties. For each of our methodologies, we present a case study of a specific alloy system. Experimental data are captured by additively manufacturing parts and single tracks to evaluate the proposed method. Our results show that the combination of GP and BN is a powerful and flexible tool to answer UQ problems for LPBF

A Convolutional Approach to Quality Monitoring for Laser Manufacturing

[Abstract] The extraction of meaningful features from the monitoring of laser processes is the foundation of new non-destructive quality inspection methods for the manufactured pieces, which has been and remains a growing interest in industry. We present ConvLBM, a novel approach to monitor Laser Based Manufacturing processes in real-time. ConvLBM uses a Convolutional Neural Network model to extract features and quality indicators from raw Medium Wavelength Infrared coaxial images. We demonstrate the ability of ConvLBM to represent process dynamics, and predict quality indicators in two scenarios: dilution estimation in Laser Metal Deposition, and location of defects in laser welding processes. Obtained results represent a breakthrough in the 3D printing of large metal parts, and in the quality control of welding processes. We are also releasing the first large dataset of annotated images of laser manufacturing

High speed in-process defect detection in metal additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) is defined as the process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing technologies. This fabricating technique is also famously known as ‘3D printing’. Although its entire manufacturing chain is becoming more mature by improved pre-defined design, more accurate heat input and motion system and cleaner in-chamber atmosphere, there are still a number of influential factors that can have a negative impact on the manufacturing process that introduce ‘defects’, which will greatly lessen the density of the parts or even result in failure. For this reason, it is critical to be able to discover them effectively during the manufacturing process. This thesis aims to develop a methodology for the measurement and characterisation of surface texture of AM parts. Typically, optical metrology instruments including focus variation (FV) microscopy and fringe projection (FP) have been used to measure the surface texture of AM samples due to their suitability and reliability in the field of metrology. The thesis also develops optimum filtration methodology to characterise the AM surface by comparing different filters. In the recent decades, machine learning (ML) is presenting a high robustness and applicability in defect detection in comparison to the traditional digital image processing technique. In this thesis, several ML techniques have been investigated into in terms of their suitability for the research based on the processed data secured from the optical measuring instrument. A detailed defect review that collects the information in terms of the defects in LPBF process based on the related research of the global researchers is given. It provides the details about different types of defects and discusses the potential correlation between process parameters and generated defects. ML and AM are both research fields that have developed rapidly in recent decades. In particular, the combination of the two can effectively achieve the purpose of AM parameter optimisation, process control and defect detection. A review of the adaptability of ML to different types of data and its application in feature extraction to achieve in-line or offline defect detection is given. Specifically, it demonstrates how to select proper ML technique given various types of data and how to choose appropriate ML model depending on different forms of defect detection (defect classification and defect segmentation). For data acquisition, the parameters including the magnification of objective lens and illumination source of the optical instrument are optimised to provide accurate and reliable data. Then the surface is pre-processed and filtered with the discovered optimal filtration method. The applicability of different types of machine learning methods for defect detection is also investigated. Results show that principal component analysis may not be a suitable tool for classifying defects if using exclusively whereas convolutional neural network and U-Net (full convolutional network) have shown good performance in correctly classifying defects and segmenting defects from the measured surface. For future work, more measurement instruments which can potentially achieve efficient and accurate metrology can be considered being developed and used, and the variety of samples needs to be increased to provide more types of surface topographies. In addition, how to improve the applicability of PCA in defect classification for AM parts can be studied on and more values of hyperparameters and number of parameters of neural networks can be used to further improve the suitability of the model for the training data

Transfer Learning Approach to Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing Defect Detection

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) remains a predominately open-loop additive manufacturing process with minimal in-situ quality and process control. Some machines feature optical monitoring systems but lack automated analytical capabilities for real-time defect detection. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) present compelling solutions to analyze images in real-time and to develop in-situ monitoring. Approximately 30,000 selective laser melting (SLM) build images from 31 previous builds are gathered and labeled as either “okay” or “defect”. Then, 14 open-sourced CNN were trained using transfer learning to classify the SLM build images. These models were evaluated by F1 score and down selected to the top 3 models. The top 3 models were then retrained and evaluated using Dietterich’s 5x2 cross-validation and compared with pairwise student t-tests. The pairwise t-test results show no statistically significant difference in performance between VGG- 19, Xception, and InceptionResNet. All models are strong candidates for future development and refinement. Additional work addresses the entire model development process and establishes a foundation for future work. Collaborations with computer science students has produced an image pre-processing program to enhance as-taken SLM images. Other outcomes include initial work to overlay CAD layer images and preliminary hardware integration plan for the SLM machine. The results from this work have demonstrated the potential of an optical layer-wise image defect detection system when paired with a CNN

Data analysis as the basis for improved design for additive manufacturing (DFAM)

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has a large potential to revolutionize the manufacturing industry, yet the printing parameters and part design have a profound impact on the robustness of the printing process as well as the resulting quality of the manufactured components. To control the printing process, a substantial number of parameters is measured while printing and used primarily to control and adjust the printing process in-situ. The question raised in this paper is how to benefit from these data being gathered to gain insight into the print process stability. The case study performed included the analysis of data gathered during printing 22 components. The analysis was performed with a widely used Random Forest Classifier. The study revealed that the data did contain some detectable patterns that can be used further in assessing the quality of the printed component, however, they were distinct enough so that in case the test and train sets were comprised of separate components the predictions\u27 result was very poor. The study gives a good understanding of what is necessary to do a meaningful analytics study of manufacturing data from a design perspective