Melt pool monitoring in laser beam melting with two-wavelength holographic imaging

Over the past two decades, laser beam melting has emerged as the leading metal additive manufacturing process for producing small- and medium-size structures. However, a key obstacle for the application of this technique in industry is the lack of reliability and qualification mainly because of melt pool instabilities during the laser-powder interaction, which degrade the quality of the manufactured components. In this paper, we propose multiwavelength digital holography as a proof of concept for in situ real-time investigation of the melt pool morphology. A two-wavelength digital holographic setup was co-axially implemented in a laser beam melting facility. The solidified aluminum tracks and melt pools during the manufacturing of 316L were obtained with full-field one-shot acquisitions at short exposure times and various scanning velocities. The evaluation of the complex coherence factor of digital holograms allowed the quality assessment of the phase reconstruction. The motion blur was analyzed by scanning the dynamic melt pool.