In-situ porosity prediction in metal powder bed fusion additive manufacturing using spectral emissions: a prior-guided machine learning approach

Numerous efforts in the additive manufacturing literature have been made toward in-situ defect prediction for process control and optimization. However, the current work in the literature is limited by the need for multi-sensory data in appropriate resolution and scale to capture defects reliably and the need for systematic experimental and data-driven modeling validation to prove utility. For the first time in literature, we propose a data-driven neural network framework capable of in-situ micro-porosity localization for laser powder bed fusion via exclusively within hatch strip of sensory data, as opposed to a three-dimensional neighborhood of sensory data. We further propose using prior-guided neural networks to utilize the often-abundant nominal data in the form of a prior loss, enabling the machine learning structure to comply more with process physics. The proposed methods are validated via rigorous experimental data sets of high-strength aluminum A205 parts, repeated k-fold cross-validation, and prior-guided validation. Using exclusively within hatch stripe data, we detect and localize porosity with a spherical equivalent diameter (SED) smaller than $$50.00\,\upmu $$ 50.00 μ m with a classification accuracy of $$73.13\pm 1.57\%$$ 73.13 ± 1.57 % This is the first work in the literature demonstrating in-situ localization of porosities as small as $$38.12\,\upmu m$$ 38.12 μ m SED and is more than a five-fold improvement on the smallest SED porosity localization via spectral emissions sensory data in the literature. In-situ localizing micro-porosity using exclusively within hatch-stripe data is a significant step towards within-layer defect mitigation, advanced process feedback control, and compliance with the reliability certification requirements of industries such as the aerospace industry.