scanning motion of the part by the table, with simultaneous modulation of the
source power and wire feeder rate, under central computer control. The
temperature field on the top surface of each layer is monitored in-process by an
infrared pyrometry camera, with an electromechanical scanner and a liquid N2cooled HgCdTe detector, sensitive in the wavelength range of 8-12 pm. The spatial
resolution of the camera image (256 x 200pixels) is 0.12 mm on the part surface,
and the temperature accuracy *2"C in a 1000C range. The thermal images provide
feedback to the control computer in real time through a frame grabber, and they
are also stored in composite video format for off-line analysis by image processing
software. For this optimization problem, since standard gradient (steepest descent)
algorithms require computationally expensive evaluations of these derivatives,
which are sensitive to noise in the thermal measurements and the conditioning of
matrix A, a robust and efficient unconstrained simplex optimization method without
derivatives was preferred.
The design methodology of thermal feedback control systems for a wide class of
rapid prototyping processes was
laboratory tests. This approach overcomes the difficulties related to the inherent
nonlinearity of the heat transfer phenomena and distributed-parameter nature of
such thermal processes, revealed in their numerical modeling, through a
multivariable, linearized state-space description of lumped temperature outputs and
heat inputs at the nodes of a grid.
A combination of geometric and thermal control methods pertaining to regulation of
rapid prototyping techniques is still on current experimentation
SUBMITTED BY:
PELAGIO, MARIA MIKAELA VERGA
SUBMITTED TO: