Deposition-Path Generation of SS308 Components Manufactured by TIG Welding-Based Shaped Metal Deposition Process

Abstract

Wire plus arc-based shaped metal deposition is a metal rapid manufacturing technique whereby 3D complex parts are produced by building up metallic parts in layer by layer. In the present work, a type of shaped metal deposition using tungsten inert gas welding plus SS308LSi Wire technique was developed and integrated it with a new computer-aided metal deposition machine (CAMDM). The intent of this paper is to investigate the CAMDM system capabilities about the part modeling and slicing, deposition-path planning, and the part depositing processes. Additionally, this paper highlights the capabilities and limitations of the developed system. The results show that the current manufacturing system is capable to produce various features for metal components with accepted surface quality and free internal defects. The most suitable deposition-path strategy for depositing the solid and hollow components is the combined pattern method, which comprises of the spiral/contour path pattern for the outside/inside boundaries of the part and either spiral or zigzag/raster path pattern for the interior spaces. The controlling system of the present setup allows tuning the deposition parameters during deposition process which usually contributes with selecting of the proper path pattern to manufacture a free defects deposited parts.