<p style="text-align: justify">The rapid growth of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies has urged new and innovative Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) solutions to emerge. The possibility of depositing complex geometry components in a short period of time, particularly achieved through Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) technology with very high deposition rates, stands as the prime reason for the industries that are inclined toward adopting the technology. Therefore, the NDE solutions developed and employed for quality assessment of such technologies should be tailored to foster agility and flexibility, and to not obstruct the high throughput of the WAAM technology. Driven by these prime motivations, the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering (CUE) at the University of Strathclyde has been working on the development of a bespoke high temperature phased array inspection roller-probe that can be delivered, by fully automated robotic manipulators, to the as-built surface of WAAM components for volumetric, or in-process multi-layer-specific, inspection without the need for subsequent post-processing or machining. The work package had different development stages in the past 3 years and still ongoing. Hence, the presentation intends to lay out the roadmap for the design of the system and to highlight the key accomplishments to date. The inspection system was introduced to overcome the time-consuming previous manual/automated post-manufacturing inspection strategies such as ultrasonic inspection in immersion baths, from the back of WAAM baseplate, and machined surface of deposited components, which are all recognized to be inefficient given the large scale of immersion basins and the amount of the surface preparations required. To this end, the present research will demonstrate development stages of a high temperature phased array roller-probe with major characteristics of a) withstanding surface temperatures up to 350 ˚C aided by an active cooling system, b) conforming to the contour of the as-built WAAM component (removing the need for post-machining), and c) multi-layer Total Focusing Method (TFM) imaging through the structural constituent components of the probe and the curved contour of the WAAM surface. The presentation will also cover the integration of the roller-probe within an automated robotic system through a force-torque sensor, where the robotic path planning, roller-probe pose, and applied contact forces and torques between the probe and the WAAM component surface are controlled in real-time during the inspection. The inspection system is currently being coupled with a WAAM deposition robot in a WAAM manufacturing cell where the inspector robot manipulates the roller-probe with a constant force on WAAM performing interlayer inspections and collect position-encoded Full Matrix Capture (FMC) data. The data is then processed by Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) to estimate the WAAM surface contour for each set of the FMC data. The estimated surface profiles are accounted for in the subsequent ray-tracing and time of flight calculations to construct a delay-and-sum adaptive TFM image.</p>

A Bespoke Phased Array Inspection System Development Intended for Automated In-Process Inspection of Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (Waam)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/qnde/QNDE2021/volume/85529

ASME 2021 48th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE2021)

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