Abstract
Low-cost high-resolution metal 3-D printing remains elusive for the scientific community. Low-cost gas metal arc wire (GMAW)-based 3-D printing enables wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) for near net shape applications, but has limited resolution due to the complexities of the arcing process. To begin to monitor and thus control these complexities, the initial designs of the open source GMAW 3-D printer have evolved to include current and voltage monitoring. Building on this prior work, in this study, the design, fabrication and use of the open source arc analyzer is described. The arc analyzer is a multi-sensor monitoring system for quantifying the processing during WAAM, which includes voltage, current, sound, light intensity, radio frequency, and temperature data outputs. The open source arc analyzer is tested here on aluminum WAAM by varying wire feed rate and measuring the resultant changes in the sensor data. Visual inspection and microstructural analysis of the printed samples looking for the presence of porosity are used as the physical indicators of quality. The value of the sensors was assessed and the most impactful sensors were found to be the light and radio frequency sensors, which showed arc extinction events and a characteristic “good weld” peak frequency.
Highlights
Low-cost high-resolution metal 3-D printing remains elusive for the scientific community
The self-Replicating Rapid-prototyper (RepRap) community [2,3,4], has developed an opensource metal 3-D printer with a gas metal arc welding (GMAW)-based print head, which reduces the costs of metal 3-D printers to less than $1200 [5] and greatly expands accessibility of metal additive manufacturing (AM)
The three deposited sample groups demonstrated the impact of a wide range of wire feed speed (WFS) for the selected print parameters
Summary
Low-cost high-resolution metal 3-D printing remains elusive for the scientific community. This research has shown that GMAW-based metal 3-D printing produces solids with low porosity and good adhesion between layers, but the minimum feature size is greater (~0.5 mm for steel and ~2 mm for aluminum) than those of conventional material extrusion-based polymer 3-D printing as well as powder-based metal 3-D printing techniques These large track widths enable WAAM to have high metal deposition rates and has the potential to be a suitable candidate for replacing or augmenting current manufacturing methods especially when a near net shape is allowed [27]. To push this technology to applications beyond those only requiring a low resolution [1] process, monitoring and control of the arc are necessary. This approach provides guidance for further improving the WAAM process as it finds differences in sensor data associated with physical and dimensional indicators of quality
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