Collaborative control for in situ monitoring of molten pool in selective laser melting

In situ monitoring during the selective laser melting (SLM) process is a promising solution to mitigate defects and improve the quality of as-built parts. However, the existing monitoring platform lacks collaborative control of the process monitoring components, and as a result, it cannot realize a real-time and accurate signal acquisition at a close distance and multiple angles during the whole printing process. In this paper, driven by multiple motors, an off-axis monitoring platform is constructed that enables movement in conjunction with the scraper and laser beam. A fuzzy control-based velocity optimization is proposed to avoid the shock effect on the imaging quality of the CMOS camera and the collision of the scraper and laser. The error between the current location and target location of the molten pool is utilized as the input of the fuzzy controller. Then, the parameters of the PI controller of the stepping motor are dynamically adjusted. ADAMS and SIMULINK co-simulation are conducted to verify the feasibility of the fuzzy algorithm. Finally, the experiment of collaborative motion and the responses of each module are conducted. The results show that with the proposed collaborative platform, the response speed of the system is improved by about 49.6%, and the initial speed of the motor is decreased by about 12.6%, thus avoiding excessive acceleration of the motor. The response time of each motor is ahead of schedule by about 31.8%, which meets the requirements of motion response for SLM process monitoring.