Development of a Cooperative System for Wire and arc-based additive manufacturing and Machining

Abstract

Additive manufacturing processes, which can fabricate complicated shapes from 3D-CAD data, have become a popular approach to making prototypes, machine parts, and die tools. However, selective laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) techniques, which have become mainstream, are expensive. Furthermore, the built efficiency (i.e., the amount of laminated material volume per unit time), is not high. Therefore, we propose a wire and arc-based additive manufacturing process that is inexpensive and has a built efficiency ten times higher than SLS and SLM. With this process, the surface roughness of fabricated objects is several hundred μm or more; therefore a finishing process is unnecessary. In this paper, a cooperative system for wire and arc-based additive manufacturing and machining was developed, and the effectiveness of the system was demonstrated. First, a three-dimensional fabricated object was measured by SfM (structure from motion), and measurement accuracy was investigated. Then the original workpiece design was modified, and the amount of material removed on the finish cutting was optimized. As a result, the fabricated objects did not contain a large amount of material to be removed by finish cutting.