Business case for IoT instrumentation of existing machines: A Laser Based Additive Manufacturing (LBAM) use case

Context

This data comes from a Pitch-In funded project to sensorise an LBAM machine using Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components and analysing the buisness implications surrounding the end results.

Laser Based Additive Manufacturing is a manufacturing-grade 3D printing technology that instead uses metal powder to form the layers of the build. The metal powder is fused together by passing the powder through the path of a laser. With this you can build strong, custom parts for a wide range of use cases. You can also theoretically build directly onto an existing part allowing broken components to be repaired rather than being thrown away and replaced. The disadvantages with this technology is it's rather difficult to control due to the number of parameters that affect the end quality.

The goal of this project is to see if defects can be detected using cheap, IoT sensors. At the end of this project, two systems were developed, tested and used to collect information from inside a BEAM Magic 2.0 to build test projects.

The first is a thermal camera system composed of a MLX90640 thermal camera and a Raspberry Pi. The camera was position at a fixed distance from the build site inside the machine and records the radiative heat being emitted from the build site.

The second is a bank of Hall Sensors postioned at a fixed distance from the build site and was designed to record the magnetic activity generated by the melting of the powder.

Data was also collected from devices and sensors installed inside the machine. For example, a thermal camera was already installed in the LBAM machine by another team. It was connected in parallel with the laser head and records the heat distribution generatd by the laser. It also records the radiative heat from the build site, but as the camera was relative close to the build site, it gives a decent sense of the relative distribution of the heat across the space.

Content

This dataset is a copy of the key data collected during the project.

pi-camera-data-127001-2019-10-14T12-41-20.hdf5 : The thermal data recorded by the thermal camera setup during a build of an arrow shaped product composed of three layers. It is the main focus of the project's analysis.

video.h264 : The thermal footage using the camera already installed inside the machine during the arrow shape build. The camera recorded the laser heat distribution across the buold site.

Acknowledgements

A big thanks to Pitch-In for funding this project and to the technicians at MAPP for running the BEAM machine and helping us to collect data.