Monitoring the gas metal arc additive manufacturing process using unsupervised machine learning

The study aimed to assess the performance of several unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques in online anomaly (The term “anomaly” is used here to indicate a departure from expected process behavior which may indicate a quality issue which requires further investigation. The term “defect detection” has often been used previously but the specific imperfection is often indirectly inferred.) detection during surface tension transfer (STT)-based wire arc additive manufacturing. Recent advancements in quality monitoring for wire arc manufacturing were reviewed, followed by a comparison of unsupervised ML techniques using welding current and welding voltage data collected during a defect-free deposition process. Both time domain and frequency domain feature extraction techniques were applied and compared. Three analysis methodologies were adopted: ML algorithms such as isolation forest, local outlier factor, and one-class support vector machine. The results highlight that incorporating frequency analysis, such as fast Fourier transform (FFT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT), for feature extraction based on general frequency response and defined bandwidth frequency response, significantly improves performance, reflected in a 14% increase in F2 score, compared with time-domain features extraction. Additionally, a deep learning approach employing a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) demonstrated superior performance by processing time-frequency domain data stored as spectrograms obtained through short-time Fourier transform (STFT) analysis. The CAE method outperformed frequency domain analysis and traditional ML approaches, achieving an additional 5% improvement in F2-score. Notably, the F2-score (The F2 score is the weighted harmonic mean of the precision and recall (given a threshold value). Unlike the F1 score, which gives equal weight to precision and recall, the F2 score gives more weight to recall than to precision.) increased significantly from 0.78 in time domain analysis to 0.895 in time-frequency analysis. The study emphasizes the potential of utilizing low-cost sensors to develop anomaly detection modules with enhanced accuracy. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating advanced data processing techniques in wire arc additive manufacturing for improved quality control and process optimization.