Nozzle-to-Work Distance Measurement and Control in Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing

Raven Thomas Reisch, Tobias Hauser, Jan Franke, Florian Heinrich, Konstantinos Theodorou, Tobias Kamps, Alois Knoll

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

In multi-axes Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing, keeping the correct nozzle-to-work distance is crucial to avoid collisions and process defects. Measuring this distance is challenging as the welding arc complicates the usage of conventional distance measurements without positional offset in-process. For that reason, this study investigated and evaluated the usage of several sensors (wire feed sensor, current and voltage sensor, microphone, welding camera, spectrometer, structural acoustic sensor) for a direction independent in-process measurement. Features were extracted based on domain knowledge and selected by means of a correlation analysis. The spectrometer (Pearson's r = -0.90) showed the most robust measurements for stable process parameters when computing the relative intensity at a wavelength of 960 nm, followed by the welding camera (Pearson's r = 0.84) when analyzing the images with a convolutional neural network. Based on the findings, a closed-loop-control was created. As a system identification revealed a high impact of the welding speed on the track height in comparison to the wire feed rate (Pearson's r - 0.90 < > - 0.16), the closed-loop-control was realized by means of a simple P-control for the welding speed. The proposed approach enabled the manufacturing of multi-layer multi-bead parts with multi-axes deposition paths.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationESSE 2021 - 2nd European Symposium on Software Engineering
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages163-172
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450385060
DOIs
StatePublished - 19 Nov 2021
Event2nd European Symposium on Software Engineering, ESSE 2021 - Virtual. Online, Greece
Duration: 6 Nov 20218 Nov 2021

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference2nd European Symposium on Software Engineering, ESSE 2021
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityVirtual. Online
Period6/11/218/11/21

Keywords

  • closed-loop-control
  • neural networks
  • process monitoring
  • sensors
  • signal processing
  • wire arc additive manufacturing

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