| Abstrakt: |
Additive manufacturing is a production technique increasingly used in the aerospace industry. Among different methods, one of the most popular is Direct Metal Laser Melting (DMLM), which provides an opportunity to produce complex parts with minor waste of parent alloy. Every alloy requires developing a new parameter set defined for a specific type of geometry. Besides developing basic parameters such as laser speed, laser power, laser spot size, trace spacing it is also necessary to investigate interactions between them. Development of the parameters is a multistage iterative process, which can be divided into the following steps: build preparation, printing process, build post-processing, and sample evaluation. Those steps often consist of excessive, repetitive, and occasionally subjective tasks that can benefit from automation. This paper focuses on creating digital tools to assist users in the last step - sample evaluation, mainly for quantitative image analysis tasks such as image pre-processing, or porosity testing (overall level, maximum anomaly size, subsurface defects assessment). Compared to manual metallographic characterization, which is often time-consuming and depends on the subjective judgment of the engineer, digital tools can significantly reduce the analysis time, provide more complete data and standardize the results. It was observed that the usage of digital tools through every step of the parameters development reduced the time by around 80% compared to the previous process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
