Machine learning-enabled real-time anomaly detection for electron beam powder bed fusion additive manufacturing

Despite the many advantages and increasing adoption of Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-EB) additive manufacturing by industry, current PBF-EB systems remain largely unstable and prone to unpredictable anomalous behaviours. Additionally, although featuring in-situ process monitoring, PBF-EB systems show limited capabilities in terms of timely identification of process failures, which may result into considerable wastage of production time and materials. These aspects are commonly recognized as barriers for the industrial breakthrough of PBF-EB technologies. On top of these considerations, in our research we aim at introducing real-time anomaly detection capabilities into the PBF-EB process. To do so, we build our case-study on top of a Arcam EBM A2X system, one of the most diffused PBF-EB machines in industry, and make access to the most relevant variables made available by this machine during the layering process. Thus, seeking a proficient interpretation of such data, we introduce a deep learning autoencoder-based anomaly detection framework. We demonstrate that this framework is able not only to early identify anomalous patterns from such data in real-time during the process with a F1 score around 90%, but also to anticipate the failure of the current job by 6 h, on average, and in one case by almost 20 h. This avoids waste of production time and opens the way to a more controllable PBF-EB process.