Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing pp 331-344 | Cite as
Use of High-Speed Photography to Track and Analyze Melt Pool Quality in Selective Laser Sintering
Abstract
Manufacturing industry is moving toward a process model involving rapid and frequent product deliveries to increase their consumer base. Employing laser sintering methods in product fabrication provides a superior quality, low cost and high-fidelity solution to support this. Effective monitoring and diagnostics of laser sintering process become a critical task in this regard. This paper focuses on analyzing spatters and plume generated during continuous laser sintering for fabrication of circular rings. Analysis using high-speed photography and subsequent image processing was undertaken. By varying laser parameters, the generated spatter and plume was tracked and features such as spatter count, spatter size, and plume area were examined. Results show that spatter count and plume size are related to the variations in laser power intensity. Optimal power settings are shown to produce best quality product. The proposed analysis method could be used to monitor the stability of laser sintering process.
Keywords
Metallurgy Selective laser sintering Spatter tracking Plume tracking High-speed camera Frame rateNotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Department of Electronics and Telecommunication, College of Engineering, Pune, for permitting the usage of the high-speed camera to capture the entire laser sintering process.
References
- 1.Morgan, R, Papworth, A, Sutcliffe, C, Fox, P, O’Neill, W.: High density net shape components by direct laser re-melting of single-phase powders. J Mater Sci.; 37:3093–3100 (2002).Google Scholar
- 2.Craeghs, Tom and Clijsters, Stijn and Yasa, Evren and Kruth, Jean-Pierre: Online quality control of selective laser melting, Proceedings of the Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin, TX, pp. 212–226 (2011).Google Scholar
- 3.Olakanmi, E.O., Cochrane, R.F., Dalgarno, K.W.: A review on selective laser sintering/melting (SLS/SLM) of aluminium alloy powders: Processing, microstructure, and properties, Progress in Materials Science, 74, pp. 401–477 (2015).Google Scholar
- 4.Kruth, J.P., Froyen, L., Van Vaerenbergh, J., Mercelis, P., Rombouts, M. and Lauwers, B.: Selective laser melting of iron-based powder, Journal of Materials Processing Technology, 149(1), pp. 616–622 (2004).Google Scholar
- 5.Berumen, S., Bechmann, F., Lindner, S., Kruth, J. P., Craeghs, T.: Quality control of laser-and powder bed-based Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies, Physics procedia, 5, pp. 617–622 (2010).Google Scholar
- 6.Yasa, E., Deckers, J., Kruth, J. P.: The investigation of the influence of laser re-melting on density, surface quality and microstructure of selective laser melting parts, Rapid Prototyping Journal, 17(5), pp. 312–327 (2011).Google Scholar
- 7.You, D, Gao, X, Katayama, S: Monitoring of high-power laser welding using high-speed photographing and image processing. J Mech Sys and Sig Proc., 49(1–2), pp. 39–52 (2014).Google Scholar
- 8.Kar, A., Sankaranarayanan, S, Kahlen, F.J.: One-step rapid manufacturing of metal and composite parts, U.S. Patent 6,526,327 (2003).Google Scholar
- 9.Vision Research, www.visionresearch.com.
- 10.Piccardi M: Background subtraction techniques: A review, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (2004).Google Scholar
- 11.Sobral, A., Vacavant A.: A comprehensive review of background subtraction algorithms evaluated with synthetic and real videos, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 122, 4–21 (2014).Google Scholar
- 12.Prasad, DK., Rajan, D, Rachmawati, L, Rajabally, E, Quek, C: Video Processing From Electro-Optical Sensors for Object Detection and Tracking in a Maritime Environment: A Survey, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (2017).Google Scholar