Abstract
The wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) process applies gas metal arc welding (GMAW) technology. The wire materials of aluminum alloy are melted to form metal droplet by the arc discharge and are accumulated layer-by-layer in this process. The arc voltage and arc acoustic emission (AE) signals were detected synchronously in the experiment. According to the signal feature of arc voltage and arc AE, the droplet transfer behaviors in various transfer modes were investigated based on the GMAW-WAAM process. Furthermore, significance of parameters was analyzed and computational models of droplet size and deposition rate were developed to evaluate the quality and efficiency of WAAM. The results showed that the identification of the characteristics of droplet transfer mode can be realized by means of arc signals analysis, which is an alternative method for the analysis of droplet transfer in the GMAW-WAAM process. The interaction of arc voltage and arc current (U × I) is the most important factor to influence the droplet transfer, and the cubic polynomial regression equation is a more ideal model to describe the relationship between the frequency of droplet transfer and arc power. The droplet radius decreases exponentially with the increase of frequency of droplet transfer, and the deposition rate increases with the increase of droplet transfer frequency by cubic polynomial rule.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Basic Science and Frontier Technology Research Project of the Chongqing Science and Technology Commission of China (Grant No. cstc2017jcyjBX0065 and No. cstc2015jcyjA60009) and the fund of the State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing in NWPU (Grant No. SKLSP201717).
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Liang, Z., Jinglong, L., Yi, L. et al. Characteristics of metal droplet transfer in wire-arc additive manufacturing of aluminum alloy. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 99, 1521–1530 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-018-2604-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-018-2604-7