In-situ additive manufacturing deposition trajectory monitoring and compensation with thermal camera

Modern additive manufacturing systems still suffer from low fabrication accuracy and speed. This issue is particularly severe for thermal reaction bonding material extrusion systems, where the motion and the deposition processes are coupled. To enhance the deposition accuracy, this work established a method to use real-time in-situ thermal images to capture and compensate for the geometrical accuracy of the printed parts and establish the spatial and temporal relationship between the inaccuracy and the deposition trajectory commands. The paper derives an analytical slender condition to process the printing regions with low curvature while establishing deposition direction allocation methods to account for the trajectory regions with high curvature. Real-time thermal image localization is performed with key printing feature detection and calibration. The localized and calibrated thermal images are aligned with the defined deposition direction to acquire the deposition inaccuracies. With the deposition dynamics considered, the deposition inaccuracy is reduced via dynamic deposition rate compensation. The proposed thermal imaging and compensation techniques have been experimentally verified with a material extrusion experimental platform to illustrate its capabilities to alleviate the deposition inaccuracy during the corner regions.

Recommended citation: Chen, S., Yang, Y., Liu, S. and Duan, M., 2023. In-situ additive manufacturing deposition trajectory monitoring and compensation with thermal camera. Additive Manufacturing, 78, p.103820.
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