If ‘you are what you eat’, then it stands to reason an additively manufactured part will only be as good as the metal powder fed into the AM machine. On 15 March, 10:00 – 10:30 at the Additive World 'Industrial 3d Printing Conference' in Eindhoven, LPW’s CEO Dr Phil Carroll will present ‘From Pizza to Powder: the use of Machine Learning to control powders and realise the potential of new business models’.
Metal powder evolves during use and re-use. The thickness of the oxide layer increases with thermal cycling and exposure to oxygen in the atmosphere, and the changes affect the process parameters of the AM machine and the final mechanical properties of the end product.
LPW has developed a technique to correlate image analysis of metal powder to its oxygen content. Machine learning algorithms use colour data from the powder image to determine the oxide layer thickness and infer powder oxygen content information. From this data adaptive parameters can be developed for the AM machine to accommodate the change in the powder. Further data analysis of the image can be done offline to analyse trends and optimise the process. Food for thought!
For more information contact marketing@lpwtechnology.com