Rapid Part Qualification Methodology of Aircraft Metallic Components using Direct Digital Manufacturing Technologies

Metal Digital Direct Manufacturing (MDDM) or layer-by-layer additive manufacturing is inherently green, produces near net shapes, reduces labor content, and does not require the use of special tooling to fabricate components. However, the process struggles to gain wide acceptance for producing aerospace and defense metal components due to two key issues. First, current powder and wire feed processes struggle to maintain high uniformity of part dimension and microstructure. Second, the current time required to qualify a MDDM component is so excessive it greatly restricts overall acceptance and usage of the process. In response, Keystone is developing, for implementation during this project, an adaptive feed-forward process control with feedback monitoring to ensure the process accounts for the thermal latency and thereby sustain aerospace levels of quality throughout the deposited component. Thus, this proposed project will utilize a wire feed, laser based MDDM system to build and validate a hybrid feed-forward / feedback monitoring capability, validation of a Rapid Process Qualification methodology and complete MDDM of a selected component.