Heterogeneous sensor-based condition monitoring in directed energy deposition
Mohammad Montazeria, Abdalla R. Nassar, Christopher B. Stutzman, Prahalada Raoa
Additive Manufacturing, Volume 30, December 2019, 100916
Abstract
The objective of this work is to detect in situ the occurrence of lack-of-fusion defects in titanium alloy (Ti-6Al-4 V) parts made using directed energy deposition (DED) additive manufacturing (AM). We use data from two types of in-process sensors, namely, a spectrometer and an optical camera which are integrated into an Optomec MR-7 DED machine. Both sensors are focused on capturing the dynamic phenomena around the melt pool region. To detect lack-of-fusion defects, we fuse (combine) the data from the in-process sensors invoking the concept of Kronecker product of graphs. Subsequently, we use the features derived from the graph Kronecker product as inputs to a machine learning algorithm to predict the severity (class or level) of average length of lack-of-fusion defects within a layer, which is obtained from offline X-ray computed tomography of the test parts. We demonstrate that the severity of lack-of-fusion defects is classified with statistical fidelity (F-score) close to 85% for a two-level classification scenario, and approximately 70% for a three-level classification scenario. Accordingly, this work demonstrates the use of heterogeneous in-process sensing and online data analytics for in situ detection of defects in DED metal AM process.
