Additive Manufacturing Sensor Fusion Technologies for Process Monitoring and Control.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has a demand for out-of-production parts to maintain mission readiness of various weapons platforms. Additive manufacturing (AM) is an exciting and promising manufacturing technique that can make out-of-production parts and holds the potential to solve supply chain issues, such as high costs (i.e. for low-volume parts) and sole sourcing risks. The ability of AM to solve supply chain issues can be realized if AM parts can be manufactured with consistent quality and equivalency without having to be tied to a specific AM machine, material or process. Senvol proposes to solve the above obstacles by implementing advanced, third party, in-situ monitoring systems of various modalities and by analyzing the data collected from these systems using: (1) Real-time data processing algorithms (e.g. computer vision algorithm) to extract data (i.e. process signatures), and (2) Data-driven machine learning algorithms to relate material properties and mechanical performance to process signatures. Senvol also proposes to develop standardized AM procedures that will be essential to DoD acceptance of AM parts from the DoD supply chain.