Industrial Computed Tomography for Nondestructive Inspection of Additive Manufactured Parts

Abstract

Powder bed fusion technology is one of the additive manufacturing methods that build up near net-shape complex parts from powder form of the material. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) and Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) are primary powder bed fusion technology methods for metal and polymer materials respectively. AlSi10Mg is one of the most widely used materials in DMLS applications while polyamide 2200 (PA) is frequently used in high quality functional parts production and various prototyping in SLS applications. By developing technology, AM has begun to provide solution for generating final products with complex geometries. Dimensional and structural inspection of the AM parts without any destruction has become important issue in parallel with the development of the manufacturing technology. Industrial X-Ray Computed Tomography (X-CT) is one of the promising methods that provide opportunity to nondestructive inspection of inner structure and porosity of AM manufactured part. In this study, nondestructive porosity measurement of DMLS manufactured AlSi10Mg test part and SLS manufactured PA 2200 functional part were applied by X-CT method. Density of manufactured parts was calculated by measured volume data. Moreover, density of AlSi10Mg part was defined by Archimedes method and the results were compared with each other. It can be concluded that X-CT was an effective technique to define porosity and pore distribution of the AM parts in comparison with Archimedes porosity measurements.