This article is about the thermal feedback control of distributed-parameter, dynamic

nonlinear heat transfer phenomena involved in rapid prototyping processes. During

operations, these mechanisms are captured in a numerical simulation of the
thermal field. Desktop manufacturing method includes fused wire deposition and
laminated object fabrication; the computational representation of the 3-D part
morphology is sectioned into a stack of 2-D planar or cylindrical layers. These slice
patterns are implemented physically by driving a heat and/or mass source so as to
deposit molten material layers of the proper geometry on top of each other, or to
cut respective laminations out of a continuous sheet or plate, by material removal
and thermal joining of their edges into a solid object. And with this, thermal rapid
prototyping techniques can be helpful and it is cost-efficient alternative to manual
sculpting of dedicated dies and subsequent molding or casting, in production of
small batches of a functional prototype. The quality and productivity of such freeform shaping methods relies on precise geometric control of the dimensional
tolerances of the product, as well as on thermal regulation of the resulting material
structure and mechanical properties of the part. literature appears particularly
wealthy for related mass production techniques with similar heat transfer
mechanisms, such as welding. The thermal control problem in welding is invariably
posed and solved in the lumped-parameter domain, i.e., it addresses regulation of a
few individual quality characteristics of the weld bead geometry, microstructure in
the heat affected zone or stress and strain in the joint through commensurate
distinct welding conditions, such as torch power, speed, and wire feed. The
prototype is fixed and grown on a high-speed servodriven X-Y positioning table with
optical encoder feedback, under a stationary heat and material source. Thus, the
desired heat and/or mass distribution for each layer is obtained by the proper

scanning motion of the part by the table, with simultaneous modulation of the
source power and wire feeder rate, under central computer control. The
temperature field on the top surface of each layer is monitored in-process by an
infrared pyrometry camera, with an electromechanical scanner and a liquid N2cooled HgCdTe detector, sensitive in the wavelength range of 8-12 pm. The spatial
resolution of the camera image (256 x 200pixels) is 0.12 mm on the part surface,
and the temperature accuracy *2"C in a 1000C range. The thermal images provide
feedback to the control computer in real time through a frame grabber, and they
are also stored in composite video format for off-line analysis by image processing
software. For this optimization problem, since standard gradient (steepest descent)
algorithms require computationally expensive evaluations of these derivatives,
which are sensitive to noise in the thermal measurements and the conditioning of
matrix A, a robust and efficient unconstrained simplex optimization method without
derivatives was preferred.

The design methodology of thermal feedback control systems for a wide class of
rapid prototyping processes was

validated through computer simulations and

laboratory tests. This approach overcomes the difficulties related to the inherent
nonlinearity of the heat transfer phenomena and distributed-parameter nature of
such thermal processes, revealed in their numerical modeling, through a
multivariable, linearized state-space description of lumped temperature outputs and
heat inputs at the nodes of a grid.
A combination of geometric and thermal control methods pertaining to regulation of
rapid prototyping techniques is still on current experimentation

TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF THE PHILIPPINES

363 P. CASAL ST., QUIAPO, MANILA

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

ECE 0006: FEEDBACK AND CONTROL SYSTEMS

JOURNAL CRITIQUE: In- Process Control Thermal Rapid Prototype

SUBMITTED BY:
PELAGIO, MARIA MIKAELA VERGA

SUBMITTED TO:

ENGR. MICHAEL ALLAN G. RAMOS

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016