arXiv subjects

Craig Brice

Publications and source records attributed to Craig Brice.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

QA-VLM: Providing human-interpretable quality assessment for wire-feed laser additive manufacturing parts with Vision Language Models

Image-based quality assessment (QA) in additive manufacturing (AM) often relies heavily on the expertise and constant attention of skilled human operators. While machine learning and deep learning methods have been introduced to assist in this task, they typically provide black-box outputs without interpretable justifications, limiting their trust and adoption in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a novel QA-VLM framework that leverages the attention mechanisms and reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), enriched with application-specific knowledge distilled from peer-reviewed journal articles, to generate human-interpretable quality assessments. Evaluated on 24 single-bead samples produced by laser wire direct energy deposition (DED-LW), our framework demonstrates higher validity and consistency in explanation quality than off-the-shelf VLMs. These results highlight the potential of our approach to enable trustworthy, interpretable quality assessment in AM applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Comprehensive Quality Investigations of Wire-feed Additive Manufacturing by Learning of Experimental Data

Wire-feed laser additive manufacturing is an emerging fabrication technique capable of highly automated large-scale volume production that can reduce both material waste and overall cost while improving product lead times. Quality assurance is necessary for implementation into critical structural applications. However, the large number of process variables along with the cost associated with traditional trial and error methods makes this difficult. This study investigates a comprehensive quality framework based on learning from experimental data that will enable improved quality control along with consistent microstructural features of the part. Specifically, a comprehensive experimental data across multiple process variables and output characteristics in terms of overall bead quality, geometric shape (i.g. bead height, width, fusion zone depth, etc.), and microstructural features are collected. The predicted process-geometry-microstructure relations are then captured by virtue of data-driven machine learning models. The properties of printed beads are visualized based on an extensive range of processing space within a 3-dimensional contour map. The insights and impacts of process variables on bead morphology, geometric and microstructural features are comprehensively investigated for quality improvement during manufacturing processes.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Comprehensive process-molten pool relations modeling using CNN for wire-feed laser additive manufacturing

Wire-feed laser additive manufacturing (WLAM) is gaining wide interest due to its high level of automation, high deposition rates, and good quality of printed parts. In-process monitoring and feedback controls that would reduce the uncertainty in the quality of the material are in the early stages of development. Machine learning promises the ability to accelerate the adoption of new processes and property design in additive manufacturing by making process-structure-property connections between process setting inputs and material quality outcomes. The molten pool dimensional information and temperature are the indicators for achieving the high quality of the build, which can be directly controlled by processing parameters. For the purpose of in situ quality control, the process parameters should be controlled in real-time based on sensed information from the process, in particular the molten pool. Thus, the molten pool-process relations are of preliminary importance. This paper analyzes experimentally collected in situ sensing data from the molten pool under a set of controlled process parameters in a WLAM system. The variations in the steady-state and transient state of the molten pool are presented with respect to the change of independent process parameters. A multi-modality convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for predicting the control parameter directly from the measurable molten pool sensor data for achieving desired geometric and microstructural properties. Dropout and regularization are applied to the CNN architecture to avoid the problem of overfitting. The results highlighted that the multi-modal CNN, which receives temperature profile as an external feature to the features extracted from the image data, has improved prediction performance compared to the image-based uni-modality CNN approach.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Machine learning based in situ quality estimation by molten pool condition-quality relations modeling using experimental data

The advancement of machine learning promises the ability to accelerate the adoption of new processes and property designs for metal additive manufacturing. The molten pool geometry and molten pool temperature are the significant indicators for the final part's geometric shape and microstructural properties for the Wire-feed laser direct energy deposition process. Thus, the molten pool condition-property relations are of preliminary importance for in situ quality assurance. To enable in situ quality monitoring of bead geometry and characterization properties, we need to continuously monitor the sensor's data for molten pool dimensions and temperature for the Wire-feed laser additive manufacturing (WLAM) system. We first develop a machine learning convolutional neural network (CNN) model for establishing the correlations from the measurable molten pool image and temperature data directly to the geometric shape and microstructural properties. The multi-modality network receives both the camera image and temperature measurement as inputs, yielding the corresponding characterization properties of the final build part (e.g., fusion zone depth, alpha lath thickness). The performance of the CNN model is compared with the regression model as a baseline. The developed models enable molten pool condition-quality relations mapping for building quantitative and collaborative in situ quality estimation and assurance framework.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗