SYMPOSIA PAPER Published: 01 December 2022
STP164420210127

Estimation of Printing Time for Laser-Based Powder Bed Fusion of Metals

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The additive manufacturing (AM) technology laser-based powder bed fusion of metals (PBF-LB/M) has reached technological maturity and is on the brink of industrialization. High utilization must be achieved to operate PBF-LB/M machines with high investment costs economically. However, reaching high utilization contradicts the realization of short throughput times, schedule reliability, and low work in process. In PBF-LB/M production planning, these metrics are influenced by the nesting and scheduling of build jobs. To determine these metrics and optimize their tradeoff, knowledge of build times of build jobs is essential. Therefore, an estimation method for PBF-LB/M manufacturing time is required. Due to the characteristics of the PBF-LB/M scanning process, the geometry complexity of the parts in a build job influences the manufacturing time. This influence is not considered by approaches from the literature available for AM production planning. A novel approach for the estimation of PBF-LB/M printing time is proposed to address this research gap. It includes a regression model for the estimation of the part scanning build rate dependent on the surface-to-volume ratio of the parts in a build job. The accuracy of the proposed approach is evaluated using 20 exemplary build jobs consisting of different part geometries. In the evaluation high estimation accuracy with a low mean average percentage error of 2.09% is achieved.

Author Information

Bauch, Lukas
RWTH Aachen University, Digital Additive Production, Aachen, DE
Winklbauer, Fabian
RWTH Aachen University, Digital Additive Production, Aachen, DE
Stittgen, Tobias
RWTH Aachen University, Digital Additive Production, Aachen, DE
Collet, Andreas
RWTH Aachen University, Digital Additive Production, Aachen, DE
Schleifenbaum, Johannes, Heinrich
RWTH Aachen University, Digital Additive Production, Aachen, DE
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Details
Pages: 14–28
DOI: 10.1520/STP164420210127
ISBN-EB: 978-0-8031-7736-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8031-7735-2