Prediction of Metal Additively Manufactured Surface Roughness Using Deep Neural Network

In recent years, manufacturing industries (e.g., medical, aerospace, and automobile) have been changing their manufacturing process to small-quantity batch production to flexibly cope with fluctuations in demand. Therefore, many companies are trying to produce products by introducing 3D printing technology into the manufacturing process. The 3D printing process is based on additive manufacturing (AM), which can fabricate complex shapes and reduce material waste and production time. Although AM has many advantages, its product quality is poor compared to conventional manufacturing systems. This study proposes a methodology to improve the quality of AM products based on data analysis. The targeted quality of AM is the surface roughness of the stacked wall. Surface roughness is one of the important quality indicators and can cause short product life and poor structure performance. To control the surface roughness, the resultant surface roughness needs to be predicted in advance depending on the process parameters. Various analysis methods such as data pre-processing and deep neural networks (DNN) combined with sensor data are used to predict surface roughness in the proposed methodology. The proposed methodology is applied to field data from operated wire + arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), and the analysis result shows its effectiveness, with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.93%.