A New Architectural Approach to Monitoring and Controlling AM Processes

The abilities to both monitor and control additive manufacturing (AM) processes in real-time are necessary before the routine production of quality AM parts will be possible. Currently, neither ability exist! The major reason is that AM processes are different from traditional manufacturing processes in many ways and so are the sensors and the monitoring data collected from them. In traditional manufacturing, that data is mostly numeric in nature. To that numeric data, AM monitoring data add large volumes of a variety of in situ, high-speed, image data. Collecting, fusing, and analyzing all that AM data and making the necessary control decisions is not possible using traditional, rigid, hierarchical-control architectures. Therefore, researchers are proposing to use real-time, machine-learning algorithms to analyze the data and to execute the other control functions. This paper identifies those control functions and proposes a new architecture to integrate them. This paper also shows an example of using that architecture to analyze the melt-pool, shape analysis using a clustering method.