Inference of highly time-resolved melt pool visual characteristics and spatially-dependent lack-of-fusion defects in laser powder bed fusion using acoustic and thermal emission data

With a growing demand for high-quality fabrication, the interest in real-time process and defect monitoring of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) has increased, leading manufacturers to incorporate a variety of online sensing methods including acoustic sensing, photodiode sensing, and high-speed imaging. However, real-time acquisition of high-resolution melt pool images in particular remains computationally demanding in practice due to the high variability of melt pool morphologies and the limitation of data caching and transfer, making it challenging to detect the local lack-of-fusion (LOF) defect occurrences. In this work, we propose a new acoustic and thermal information-based monitoring method that can robustly infer critical LPBF melt pool morphological features in image forms and detect spatially-dependent LOF defects within a short time period. We utilize wavelet scalogram matrices of acoustic and photodiode clip data to identify and predict highly time-resolved (within a 1.0 ms window) visual melt pool characteristics via a well-trained data-driven pipeline. With merely the acoustic and photodiode-collected thermal emission data as the input, the proposed pipeline enables data-driven inference and tracking of highly variable melt pool visual characteristics with R2≥0.8. We subsequently validate our proposed approach to infer local LOF defects between two adjacent scanlines, showing that our proposed approach can outperform our selected baseline theoretical model based on previous literature. Revealing the physical correlation between airborne acoustic emission, thermal emission, and melt pool morphology, our work demonstrates the feasibility of creating an efficient and cost-effective acoustic- and thermal-based approach to facilitate online visual melt pool characterization and LOF defect detection. We believe that our work can further contribute to the advances in quality control for LPBF.