CAM for On-line Control for Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) has the possibility to build metallic structures in 3D space. WAAM system is based on welding process to deposit metallic material and on a robot that moves the welding torch to add material at a given position. For large skeleton structures, it was chosen to deposit material point by point. Welding process induces uctuations.To be fully scalable, two main features must be taken into account. First, monitoring of the process is necessary. Local control on the geometry of the deposition must be used to reach the nal shape. Secondly, some deposition strategies must be implemented to manage branch intersections. To reach these two objectives, an adaptive and modular slicer and a process manager have been developed in order to implement this control. It allows us, if an error occurs during the deposition, to change the position of the eector. To obtain the desired geometry, the CAM software have to be able to, (i) do a slicing during the additive process of the part with a variable deposit height in order to take into account variation of the deposition process and (ii) manage the deposition strategy at intersection to output the position of the torch.