ThermaViz® – Temperature imaging (vision) sensors optimized for thermal-based additive manufacturing.
Sensors
Software
Applications
Integration
FAQ’s
- Comprehensive thermal inspection
- True temperature, independent of emissivity
- Resolve microscopic details
Data Analytics and Algorhythms
- Thermal & dimensional metrics
- Flexible optimization to specific processes, components, or materials
- Data compression
Metric-Based Process Control System
- Uniform, repeatable microstructure and mechanical properties
Defect Detection
- Algorithms detect voids, lack of fusion, porosity, or anomalous microstructure
The ThermaViz® System is a highly integrated multi-vision sensor system that utilizes sophisticated algorithms to monitor and control thermal-based additive manufacturing (AM) processes. It includes a two-wavelength imaging pyrometer for melt pool monitoring and an IR thermal imaging sensor for global heat flow monitoring. Our data analytics extracts key thermal and dimensional metrics, applying high data compression to the sizeable raw data streams. Process control features provide feedback to adjust process parameters based on the variance between the real-time metric and the user defined set point.
The quality of components manufactured in a thermal additive process is directly related to the melting and solidification of the material. Monitoring and controlling the melt pool and global heat flow throughout the build is essential to forming a microstructure with specified mechanical properties. Real-time measurement of key process metrics certifies that thermal trajectories of components during fabrication are built to qualified standards. Advanced process monitoring and control are imperative to develop significant efficiencies in AM and improve the performance and consistency of the equipment.
ThermaViz® plays a significant role in the development of processing parameters that result in component qualification. An iterative progression in model development and a design of experiments is required to select an appropriate range of fabrication parameters. Thermal monitoring provides important process details, including excessive heat flow, melt pool instability or overheating, and other critical details of the additive process which can accelerate the convergence to the optimized process parameter set. ThermaViz® is equally valuable during the production cycle to maintain machine to machine consistency and record a digital data thread of each component. The closed loop control has been demonstrated to provide precision thermal processing and associated uniform, highly repeatable microstructure.
ThermaViz® has been applied extensively to laser deposition processing and more recently to direct metal laser sintering for a range of high temperature materials, including titanium, Inconel, tool and stainless steel. These methods and technologies have considerable application to rapid qualification, including design of experiments, sensing, analytics, NDE, and correlation. Stratonics is currently developing additional sensors to add to their multi-sensor suite and is applying the global heat flow sensor to Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) equipment.