Smart Baseplate for Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) has rapidly evolved into a valuable technique for making parts which, at times, cannot be fabricated through conventional machining methods.One challenge in the area of AM is the lack of real-time feedback on the fabrication process and the quality of the part being made.This is especially critical given the relatively long periods of time that complex parts can require to construct.Hidden flaws in a part, which can be caused by excessive residual stresses, can result in the final part being unusable, wasting valuable time, resources, and AM machine life.This proposed work will develop a smart additive manufacturing (AM) baseplate for monitoring internal residual stresses and temperatures for multiple metal AM processes. This smart baseplate will allow monitoring unseen problematic areas by building a COTS distributed fiber optic sensing network directly into the baseplate with Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing (UAM). The performance of this smart baseplate will be benchmarked using an open architecture selective laser melting (SLM) platform with installed external sensors for monitoring comparison purposes.