Photodiode-based porosity prediction in laser powder bed fusion considering inter-hatch and inter-layer effects

Laser powder bed fusion, while promising, faces hurdles in certifying fabricated parts due to cost and complexity, with in-process monitoring emerging as a potential solution. Existing models focus on predicting defects at a given location using the monitoring signals from solely that same location. Hence, these models treat each track or layer independently of the previous and subsequent ones, neglecting potential interdependencies. This study proposed an in-situ, photodiode-based monitoring approach considering inter-hatch and inter-layer effects on porosity formation - factors often overlooked in existing research. Two Ti-6Al-4 V cuboids (10×10×5 mm³) were built with optimized process parameters, with the melt pool continuously monitored at 20 kHz via a co-axially mounted photodiode. The monitoring system captured the integral radiation in the near-infrared spectrum within a field of view centered on the melt pool. The porosity is assessed by X-ray computed tomography (X-CT), serving as ground truth to build supervised machine learning (ML) models. This study considered physical phenomena occurring during the printing process, including remelting of lack of fusion pores by the subsequent layer, keyholes penetrating the current layer hence introducing pores in the layer below, and overlap between adjacent scan tracks. These considerations are critical for a holistic understanding of pore formation mechanisms. Photodiode signals and computed tomography volumes were cropped using windows of four sizes to test the model's pore localization capability. A machine learning model, specifically a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) - Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, was trained to predict porosities using these window sequences. The CNN extracted spatial features from photodiode signals, addressing inter-hatch effects, while the LSTM captured temporal dependencies across layers, addressing inter-layer effects. The results, with the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.91 for pores exceeding 8000 μm³ in volume and 100 μm² in cross-sectional area, demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model in detecting pores-level defects. This high defect prediction and positioning accuracy are essential for process control, providing real-time status of the region of interest and informing the controller of pore positions, thus facilitating intra-layer or inter-layer correction.