Recently Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been hailed as the “third industrial revolution” by The Economist magazine [April-2012]. Precision of the product manufactured by AM largely depends on the on line process diagnostics and control. AM caters to the quest for a material to suit the service performance, which is almost as old as the human civilization. An enabling technology which can build, repair or reconfigure components layer by layer or even pixel by pixel with appropriate materials to match the performance will enhance the productivity and thus reduce energy consumption. With the globalization, “Economic Space” for an organization is now spreads all across the globe. The promise of AM for Global Platform for precision additive manufacturing largely depends on the speed and accuracy of in-situ optical diagnostics and its capability to integrate with the process control. The two main groups of AM are powder bed (e.g. Laser Sintering) and pneumatically delivered powder (e.g. Direct Metal Deposition [DMD]) to fabricate components. DMD has closed loop capability, which enables better dimension and thermal cycle control. This enables one to deposit different material at different pixels with a given height directly from a CAD drawing. The feed back loop also controls the thermal cycle. New optical Sensors are either developed or being developed to control geometry using imaging, cooling rate by monitoring temperature, microstructure, temperature and composition using optical spectra. Ultimately these sensors will enable one to “Certify as you Build”. Flexibility of the process is enormous and essentially it is an enabling technology to materialize many a design. Several cases will be discussed to demonstrate the additional capabilities possible with the new sensors. Conceptually one can seat in Singapore and fabricate in Shanghai. Such systems will be a natural choice for a Global “Economic Space”.
Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) for Tooling Repair of DIN 1.2343 Steel
