Discovery of Feasible 3D Printing Configurations for Metal Alloys via AI-driven Adaptive Experimental Design

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-driven adaptive experimental design method to efficiently discover feasible 3D printing configurations for metal alloys, significantly reducing time and resources needed compared to manual trial-and-error approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a surrogate model-based adaptive experimental framework tailored for metal additive manufacturing, enabling rapid discovery of defect-free printing parameters.

Findings

Achieved defect-free GRCop--42 prints within three months.

Reduced experimental resources and time compared to manual methods.

Enabled high-quality alloy fabrication on accessible laser platforms.

Abstract

Configuring the parameters of additive manufacturing processes for metal alloys is a challenging problem due to complex relationships between input parameters (e.g., laser power, scan speed) and quality of printed outputs. The standard trial-and-error approach to find feasible parameter configurations is highly inefficient because validating each configuration is expensive in terms of resources (physical and human labor) and the configuration space is very large. This paper combines the general principles of AI-driven adaptive experimental design with domain knowledge to address the challenging problem of discovering feasible configurations. The key idea is to build a surrogate model from past experiments to intelligently select a small batch of input configurations for validation in each iteration. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, we deploy it for Directed Energy Deposition process to print GRCop--42, a high-performance copper--chromium--niobium alloy developed by NASA for aerospace applications. Within three months, our approach yielded multiple defect-free outputs across a range of laser powers dramatically reducing time to result and resource expenditure compared to several months of manual experimentation by domain scientists with no success. By enabling high-quality GRCop--42 fabrication on readily available infrared laser platforms for the first time, we democratize access to this critical alloy, paving the way for cost-effective, decentralized production for aerospace applications.