In-situ monitoring of the small changes in process parameters with multi-sensor fusion during LPBF

Abstract The small changes in process parameters have significant influences on the stability of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). Therefore, monitoring the small changes in process parameters is particularly important. This paper proposed a machine learning (ML)-based multi-sensor fusion approach to monitor the LPBF processing state by combining photodiode, acoustic, and visual signals. In order to extract the motion features of the melt pool more accurately and describe its transient changes, an ellipse adjustment algorithm is proposed to segment the melt pool images, eliminating the interference of spatters. The motion features combined with preprocessed acoustic signals and photodiode signals to identify melting states during small changes in process parameters. The proposed ML-based multi-sensor fusion approach achieves impressive prediction accuracies of 99.9% for identifying the fluctuations in the process parameters. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately identify small changes in process parameters, which is of great significance for improving the process stability and providing reliable guidance in subsequent work.