THE ULTRASONIC TESTING APPROACH FOR IN-SITU MONITORING OF THE FUSED DEPOSITION MODELING PROCESS

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a modern fast-growing technology which allows for the fabrication of parts not possible to fabricate with conventional machining techniques. However, in contrast to conventional manufacturing, AM process often results in products with broad variation of properties. Individual parameters of the printing process and their combinations influence final mechanical properties of the printed material and may result in the internal defects. Therefore, inadequate selection of printing parameters may lead to defects formation, undesirable material properties or to a failure during AM process, and hence wasting time and materials. Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques could be used to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of the manufacturing process. In this contribution, the approach for enabling real-time NDE for monitoring the material properties of the printed part is suggested. The approach is based on adjustment of the printing process parameters depending on elastic properties monitoring of the material printed. There approach requires collecting the database of dependencies of printing process parameters and elastic properties of the material. Three printing parameters were chosen for this purpose: layer thickness, nozzle temperature, and nozzle speed. Virtual engineering workbench with a visual programming language LabVIEW was proposed. The approach allows for capturing the real-time in-situ sensor data and comparing it to the reference data arrays reflecting the influence of the printing process parameters. Consequently, a direct modification of the parameters during the printing process could be achieved based on the real-time sensor data.