Automatic In-Situ Inspection for Large-Scale Additive Manufacturing

Supporting sustainability initiatives, large-scale additive manufacturing (AM) has advanced to enable high-speed and high-efficiency production of polymer and composite components that are up to 10 times larger than previously producible. A critical aspect of the overall large-scale AM process is the time spent on quality management tasks. Accurate and faster inspection tasks have the potential to decrease cycle time by 30% or more compared to manual inspection, but conventional automatic inspection technologies are not designed for large-scale components. Critical performance attributes of an applicable technology include a large field of view, sizeable depth of field, large standoff distance, ability to work in ambient lighting and ultra-high pixel resolution in captured images. This presentation will describe a novel large-field automatic inspection system and ongoing work supported by a US national laboratory to apply this technology to large-scale AM.