Development of sparse, high-dynamic and information-rich approaches in optical surface metrology for next-generation, industrial additive manufacturing (NXTos-AM)

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Christopher Taudt
• Subject Area: Measurement Systems ; Primary Shaping and Reshaping Technology, Additive Manufacturing
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549906624

“Responsible Consumption and Production”, “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure” as well as “Quality Education” are important SDGs that target the way we manufacture goods and infrastructure. With limited natural resources and increasing demand, efficient usage of energy and materials is a major challenge in manufacturing. Additive Manufacturing (AM), in particu-lar metal-based AM, can address these challenges by enabling resource-efficient, demand-driven manufacturing. AM-based serial production is limited because of a lack of process trace-ability and repeatability techniques, a lack of integrated monitoring and control options as well as a lack of procedures to certify and qualify parts. Existing monitoring tools, such as imaging, fall short in their information depth, their measurable scales as well as in their ability to deliver in-line feedback. This proposal will develop novel sensing solutions to achieve process repeata-bility and qualification methods for closed-loop control to enable large scale industrial adop-tion of AM and helps to achieve the SDGs. This proposal will go beyond the state of the art by enhancing two optical approaches, low-coherence interferometry (LCI) and imaging-based dark-field scattering (DfS) with multi-spectral, multi-angular and ghost imaging capabilities in order to improve their performance in dynamic range, measurement speed, material agnostic behaviour and precision. Furthermore, it will go beyond state of the art by developing advanced algorithms for compressive sampling, sensor fusion as well as noise reduction and regression, based on hybrid approaches -a combina-tion of deterministic and ML-approaches- in order to increase speed and the information content. It is anticipated that this kind of AM-tailored sensors will result in a new level of in-line integration and autonomous operation. Closed-loop control closes the gap for large-scale industrial usage of AM and reduces costs of investment and ownership.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Australia
• Host: Professor Andrey Molotnikov, Ph.D.