IN- SITU STRUCTURED LIGHT TECHNIQUES STUDY TO INSPECT SURFACES DURING ADDITIVE MANUFACTURE

Three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement techniques play an increasingly important role in the quality control proceedures of industry, such as aerospace, bioengineering, information security, automobile, integrated circuits and so on. Additive manufacturing (AM) provide significant advantages over conventional subtractive manufacturing techniques in terms of the wide range of part geometry that can be obtained. The key metal AM technology is powder bed processing. During the AM process, powder delivery occurs thousands of times. Therefore, the assessment of delivery quality would be advantageous for the process to provide feedback for process control. After the energy source melts the powder bed, the detection of the machined surface is also a critically important criterion for the evaluation of the manufacturing quality. This thesis presents an in-situ quantitative inspection technique for the powder bed post raking and printed surface after melting, the technique uses fringe projection profilometry. In this thesis, system calibration methods, phase analysis algorithms, and error correction methods are investigated. A novel surface fitting algorithm is employed to reduce the influence of phase error and random noise during system calibration. A novel intelligent fringe projection technique using a support-vector-machine (SVM) algorithm is proposed to measure the 3D topography of high dynamic range surfaces on a layer by layer basis within the EBAM machine. A simple calibration method is used to eliminate phase errors during system calibration. The proposed in-situ inspection technique has been installed on a commercial electron beam melting (EBM) AM machine. Exemplar powder beds with defects and printed surfaces, are measured with the proposed technique. The whole inspection process lasts less than 5 seconds. Experimental results showed that the powder and the melting surface defects could be efficiently inspected using the proposed system and the measurement result could be fed back to the build process to improve the processing quality.

For the inspection of highly reflective surface geometries that have been further machined post AM, phase measuring deflectometry (PMD) has been widely studied for the 3D form measurement. This thesis presents a new direct PMD (DPMD) method that measures the full-field 3D shape of complicated specular objects. A mathematical model is derived to directly relate an absolute phase map to depth data, instead of the gradient. The 3D shape of a monolithic multi-mirror array having multiple specular surfaces was measured. Experimental results show that the proposed DPMD method can obtain the full-field 3D shape of specular objects having isolated and/or discontinuous surfaces accurately and effectively.

In this thesis, the fringe projection and the deflectometry techniques are studied. Two different measurement systems were used to measure different roughness surfaces. The experimental results shows the rough surfaces, reflective surfaces, and the highly reflective specular surfaces can be measured and reconstructed by the proposed methods.