Design of ultrasonic system for monitoring the surface roughness of 3D printed components during Abrasive Flow Machining

Abstract

Surface roughness remains a critical issue for as-built additively manufactured components. To ensure the functionality and high quality of additively manufactured components, tools to attain real-time monitoring of surface roughness are imperative in order to accelerate quality control of additively manufactured parts. In this paper, a novel ultrasonic system is proposed to provide a non-destructive and efficient technique for the measurement and monitoring of the surface roughness of Electron Beam Melted (EBM) components during Abrasive Flow machining (AFM). This technique involves the incidence of focused ultrasonic beams at an angle of zero degrees and the measurement of the resultant intensity of the reflected ultrasonic waves. In this paper, the underlying principles behind the ultrasonic monitoring system are elucidated together with the experimental results, which were conducted with different EBM samples to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the system designed. The main objective which was to evaluate the effectiveness of the ultrasonic system designed was accomplished in this project. The experiments yielded promising results and there were excellent correlations between these results and those derived from contact based profilometer testing.