Real-Time WAAM Monitoring — Layer Upon Layer at 480 fps
Wire-arc additive manufacturing seen from the side while it happens: the wire feeds, the droplet forms and each bead lands on the one below.
Key Takeaways
- Side view of the wall: wire, droplet and melt pool on every layer.
- Filmed at up to 480 fps with the arc glare filtered out.
- Layer height and bead shape can be compared pass after pass.
- A problem shows up on the layer that produced it, while the build can still be corrected.
Deploy with Therness
- Combine HeatCam thermal cameras with HeatCore AI for complete WAAM monitoring.
- Enable real-time alerts and automated process adjustments through HeatCore QMS integrations.
- Scale AI models across multiple WAAM cells with centralized training and deployment.
- Generate audit-ready reports with full traceability for aerospace and medical applications.
Why WAAM, and titanium most of all, needs live eyes on the melt pool
Titanium is unforgiving in wire-arc additive manufacturing. It holds heat, so with every bead the part runs hotter and the melt pool grows — left unchecked, the wall slumps and the geometry drifts out of tolerance. It is also fiercely reactive: any lapse in shielding lets oxygen and nitrogen into the pool, embrittling the deposit and seeding porosity. Live monitoring watches the thermal signature and melt-pool shape frame by frame, so a widening pool, a stalling cooling rate, or an interpass temperature creeping past its window is caught on the layer that produced it rather than after the build. That matters because a defect buried three layers down cannot be fixed — only scrapped or dug out. Scoring each layer as it deposits turns monitoring into a feedback loop and leaves a per-layer thermal record that stands up as evidence in an aerospace certification file.
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Transcript (short)
Show transcript
A WAAM wall filmed from the side with the PoolDrop camera while new layers are deposited. On each pass the wire feeds, a droplet forms and detaches into the melt pool, and the pool runs along the top of the wall. Captions name the camera and the frame rate, and explain that HeatCore monitors interpass temperature and geometry, bead by bead.
