Airborne acoustic emission enables sub-scanline keyhole porosity quantification and effective process characterization for metallic laser powder bed fusion

Abstract

Keyhole-induced (KH) porosity, which arises from unstable vapor cavity dynamics under excessive laser energy input, remains a significant challenge in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF). This study presents an integrated experimental and data-driven framework using airborne acoustic emission (AE) to achieve high-resolution quantification of KH porosity. Experiments conducted on an LPBF system involved in situ acquisition of airborne AE and ex situ porosity imaging via X-ray computed tomography (XCT), synchronized spatiotemporally through photodiode signals with submillisecond precision. We introduce KHLineNum, a spatially resolved porosity metric defined as the number of KH pores per unit scan length, which serves as a physically meaningful indicator of the severity of KH porosity in geometries and scanning strategies. Using AE scalogram data and scan speed, we trained a lightweight convolutional neural network to predict KHLineNum with millisecond-scale temporal resolution, achieving an R-squared value exceeding 0.8. Subsequent analysis identified the 35-45 kHz frequency band of AE as particularly informative, consistent with known KH oscillations. Beyond defect quantification, the framework also enables AE-driven direct inference of KH regime boundaries on the power-velocity process map, offering a noninvasive and scalable component to labor-intensive post-process techniques such as XCT. We believe this framework advances AE-based monitoring in LPBF, providing a pathway toward improved quantifiable defect detection and process control.