Fractal Pattern Recognition of Image Profiles for Manufacturing Process Monitoring and Control

Author(s):  
Farhad Imani ◽  
Bing Yao ◽  
Ruimin Chen ◽  
Prahalada Rao ◽  
Hui Yang

Nowadays manufacturing industry faces increasing demands to customize products according to personal needs. This trend leads to a proliferation of complex product designs. To cope with this complexity, manufacturing systems are equipped with advanced sensing capabilities. However, traditional statistical process control methods are not concerned with the stream of in-process imaging data. Also, very little has been done to investigate nonlinearity, irregularity, and inhomogeneity in image stream collected from manufacturing processes. This paper presents the multifractal spectrum and lacunarity measures to characterize irregular and inhomogeneous patterns of image profiles, as well as detect the hidden dynamics of the underlying manufacturing process. Experimental studies show that the proposed method not only effectively characterizes the surface finishes for quality control of ultra-precision machining but also provides an effective model to link process parameters with fractal characteristics of in-process images acquired from additive manufacturing. This, in turn, will allow a swift response to processes changes and consequently reduce the number of defective products. The proposed fractal method has strong potentials to be applied for process monitoring and control in a variety of domains such as ultra-precision machining, additive manufacturing, and biomanufacturing.

Author(s):  
Gustavo Tapia ◽  
Alaa Elwany

There is consensus among both the research and industrial communities, and even the general public, that additive manufacturing (AM) processes capable of processing metallic materials are a set of game changing technologies that offer unique capabilities with tremendous application potential that cannot be matched by traditional manufacturing technologies. Unfortunately, with all what AM has to offer, the quality and repeatability of metal parts still hamper significantly their widespread as viable manufacturing processes. This is particularly true in industrial sectors with stringent requirements on part quality such as the aerospace and healthcare sectors. One approach to overcome this challenge that has recently been receiving increasing attention is process monitoring and real-time process control to enhance part quality and repeatability. This has been addressed by numerous research efforts in the past decade and continues to be identified as a high priority research goal. In this review paper, we fill an important gap in the literature represented by the absence of one single source that comprehensively describes what has been achieved and provides insight on what still needs to be achieved in the field of process monitoring and control for metal-based AM processes.


Author(s):  
Farhad Imani ◽  
Ruimin Chen ◽  
Evan Diewald ◽  
Edward Reutzel ◽  
Hui Yang

Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) is a new paradigm in design-driven build of customized products. Nonetheless, mass customization and low volume production make the AM quality assurance extremely challenging. Advanced imaging provides an unprecedented opportunity to increase information visibility, cope with the product complexity, and enable on-the-fly quality control in AM. However, in-situ images of a customized AM build show a high level of layer-to-layer geometry variation, which hampers the use of powerful image-based learning methods such as deep neural networks (DNNs) for flaw detection. Few, if any, previous works investigated how to tackle the impact of AM customization on image-guided process monitoring and control. The proposed research is aimed at filling this gap by developing a novel real-time and multi-scale process monitoring methodology for quality control of customized AM builds. Specifically, we leverage the computer-aided design (CAD) file to perform shape-to-image registration and delineate the regions of interests in lay-erwise images. Next, a hierarchical dyadic partitioning methodology is developed to split layer-to-layer regions of interest into subregions with the same number of pixels to provide freeform geometry analysis. Then, we propose a semiparametric model to characterize the complex spatial patterns in each customized subregion and boost the computational speed. Finally, a DNN model is designed to learn and detect fine-grained information of flaws. Experimental results show that the proposed process monitoring and control methodology detects flaws in each layer with an accuracy of 92.50±1.03%. This provides an opportunity to reduce inter-layer variation in AM prior to completion of the build. The proposed methodology can also be generally applicable in a variety of engineering and medical domains that entail image-based process monitoring and control with customized designs.


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