Additive Manufacturing Process Monitoring and Control Technologies

This project aims to make Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing a practical tool for supply chain management for the Defense Logistics Agency.The key step is developing process standardization to make LBPF quality vendor independent. This project will seek to demonstrate the use of a promising high speed melt pool monitoring device as a practical means to establish such process standardization. The do this, the R&D team will first identify a LPBF commercial machine model that is of the most value to the DoD (i.e. is used most heavily).Then an open-architecture LPBF system, equipped with the melt pool sensor, will be configured to replicate the build conditions and capability of the target commercial system.Experiments will be conducted to show that the sensor identifies critical process control information in this configuration, and then also in an alternative configuration.The sensors quantification of the difference in performance between the two configurations will then (in Phase II) serve as input to effect process modifications in each configuration, via closed loop feedback control, to equalize the build performance of the systems, thereby showing a practical method for build standardization.