Engineering-guided Deep Feature Learning for Manufacturing Process Monitoring

Abstract

Additive manufacturing fabricates 3D parts via layer-by-layer deposition and solidification of materials. Due to the complexity of this process, advanced sensing is increasingly employed to facilitate system visibility, leading to a large amount of high-dimensional and complex-structured data. While deep learning brings attractive characteristics for data-driven process monitoring and quality prediction, it is currently limited in the ability to assimilate engineering knowledge and offer model interpretability for understanding process-quality relationships. In addition, due to spatiotemporal correlations in AM, a melt-pool anomaly observed during the manufacturing process is not always indicative of abnormal quality characteristics. There is a pressing need to go beyond pointwise analysis of melt pools and consider spatiotemporal effects for quality analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning framework guided by engineering knowledge for AM quality monitoring. First, engineering knowledge is integrated with deep learning to delineate various sources of process variations and extract melt-pool features that reflect quality-related relationships. Second, a 3D neighborhood model is designed to characterize spatiotemporal variations of melt pools based on their domain-informed features. The resulting 3D neighborhood profiles enable us to go beyond pointwise analysis of melt pools for capturing process-quality relationships. Finally, we built a regression model to predict internal density variations using 3D neighborhood profiles. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms traditional hand-crafted method and black-box learning in both the ability to provide quality-related features and predict internal density variations.