Highly flexible material synthesis and microstructure adjustment through combined laser deposition welding and short-term heat treatment for high-throughput materials development

This project aims at developing the data management for the semantic storage of all relevant process parameters as well as metadata. Furthermore, the interfaces for dynamic process control are developed.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Rolf Drechsler, Dr. Sebastian Huhn

Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) is an adaptive, powder-based manufacturing process for metals. This type of 3D-print produces large components as well as fine structures with comparatively high build-up rates. By using LMD, structures can be built upon pre-existing components and areas.

A crucial part of the realization of this research facility includes the concept and implementation of the data management. It is required to store all process- and metadata in a structured fashion to ensure a good scientific practice implying that the assurance of a prospective reconstruction (of every individual experiment), as well as the robustness of conducted data itself, is given. During this process, challenges exist due to the heterogeneity and the high data volume. Apart from this conducting process, the data are meant to be processed exhaustively by application-specific algorithms. These analysis results are used to control the manufacturing process dynamically. Such a process control necessarily requires a well-defined and fault-safe interface of the research facility, which, in the end, enables novel and highly complex LMD processes.