Issue 43

N. Montinaro et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 43 (2018) 231-240; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.43.18 231 A numerical and experimental study through laser thermography for defect detection on metal additive manufactured parts N. Montinaro, D. Cerniglia, G. Pitarresi Dipartimento dell’Innovazione Industriale e Digitale (DIID), Università degli Studi di Palermo, Palermo, Italy nicola.montinaro@unipa.it; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9607-3324 A BSTRACT . Additive manufacturing has been recently employed in industrial sectors with the fundamental requirement for zero defect parts. Technological developments in additive manufacturing notwithstanding, there continues to be a scarcity of non-destructive inspection techniques to be exploited during the manufacturing process itself, thus limiting industrial advancements and extensive applications. Therefore, being able to integrate the defect inspection phase within the additive manufacturing process would open the way to enabling corrective actions on the component in itinere , that is, before reaching the final product. For this reason, new methods of in-process monitoring are gaining more and more attention nowadays. In this work, a remote laser thermographic methodology is employed as a mean to detect micrometric defects in additive manufactured samples. Beforehand, a preliminary Finite Element Analysis was carried out in order to optimize the sensitivity of the technique to the micrometric defects. Our results indicate that the technique is proved to be quite successful in detecting flaws, with the added plus of being suitable for integration in the additive manufacturing equipment, thus allowing a continuous in-line inspection. K EYWORDS . Non-destructive testing; IR Thermography; Additive Manufacturing, Laser Thermography, FEA, Modeling. Citation: Montinaro, N., Cerniglia, D., Pitarresi, G., A numerical and experimental study through laser thermography for defect detection on metal additive manufactured parts, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 43 (2018) 231-240. Received: 12.11.2017 Accepted: 10.12.2017 Published: 01.01.2018 Copyright: © 2018 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. I NTRODUCTION ecently, additive manufacturing (AM) has been getting more and more attention in the areas of 3D geometries production and high-value parts repair, due to its increased accuracy in creating complex structures as compared to other, more traditional, manufacturing methods. A further benefit is how the mechanical properties of AM components may sometimes even surpass those of conventionally processed parts, as shown in [1]. However, due to the fact that structures are created by superimposing layer after layer, interlayer and intralayer defects can be often observed in AM components, as seen in [2] by means of scanning electron microscopy and microcomputed tomography. R