A High-Speed Look At Additive Manufacturing

According to Dr. Angel Ivan Garcia-Moreno, additive manufacturing is currently one of the most popular trends in manufacturing. It enables the creation of three-dimensional objects based on CAD designs, and it finds applications in many industries - from medicine to aerospace. Yet despite its popularity, Dr. Garcia-Moreno admits there are still several technological barriers that must be addressed to understand the process. "Our research group is working on solving several of these challenges," he says.

Recently, Dr. Garcia-Moreno and his research group studied the influence of particle velocity and powder stream dynamics on the laser metal deposition (LMD) process.  "Since the behavior of the particles between the nozzle and the substrate influences the particles' ability to absorb energy, it's important to study their dynamics so we can optimize the quality of additively manufactured parts." To this end, he has developed a new adaptive particle image velocietry (PIV) method that measures the in-flight velocity of metal particles  - information that makes in possible to identify the specific convergence zone for the nozzle using the powder stream behavior.

For these experiments, Dr. Garcia-Moreno and his lab used a Phantom VEO 710 high-speed camera, which captured the LMD process at very high frequencies without losing resolution. Download the case study to learn more.