Digital Twin-Based Laser Powder Bed Fusion In-Situ Monitoring and Healing Package

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a modern and increasingly popular manufacturing process for metallic components, but it suffers from well-known problems of inconsistent quality of the finished product. The US Navy is interested in addressing this problem by developing a digital twin-based machine control tool for in-situ AM process monitoring and healing. Therefore, sensor fusion monitoring, machine learning processing, and close-loop machine control are crucial research areas with the goal of solving this problem. To address this critical need, X-wave Innovations, Inc. (XII) and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) propose to develop an advanced digital twin-based in-situ monitoring and healing (IMH) package for powder bed fusion processes. This technology provides a real-time laser powder bed fusion process monitoring and near real-time healing solution to produce metallic end products without defects. The technology development involved digital twin-based monitoring and healing and advanced machine learning correlation algorithms. Upon completion, this technology is expected to be applicable to powder bed fusion AM processes for improved productivity and reduced rejected components due to inferior quality.