Development and control of shaped metal deposition process using tungsten inert gas arc heat source in additive layered manufacturing

Tungsten inert gas arc welding–based shaped metal deposition is a novel additive manufacturing technology which can be used for fabricating solid dense parts by melting a cold wire on a substrate in a layer-by-layer manner via continuous DC arc heat. The shaped metal deposition method would be an alternative way to traditional manufacturing methods, especially for complex featured and large-scale solid parts manufacturing, and it is particularly used for aerospace structural components, manufacturing, and repairing of die/molds and middle-sized dense parts. This article presents the designing, constructing, and controlling of an additive manufacturing system using tungsten inert gas plus wire–based shaped metal deposition method. The aim of this work is to design and develop tungsten inert gas plus wire–based shaped metal deposition system to be used for fabricating different components directly from computer-aided design data with minimum time consumed in programming and less boring task compared to conventional robotic systems. So, this article covers the important design steps from computer-aided design data to the final deposited part. The developed additive system is capable of producing near-net-shaped components of sizes not exceeding 400 mm in three-dimensional directly from computer-aided design drawing. The results showed that the developed system succeeded to produce near-net-shaped parts for various features of SS308LSi components. Additionally, workshop tests have been conducted in order to verify the capability and reliability of the developed additive manufacturing system. The developed system is also capable of reducing the buy-to-fly ratio from 5 to 2 by reducing waste material from 1717 to 268 g for the sample components.