WAAM Thermal Monitoring
Thermal visualization of Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing highlighting bead uniformity and cooling profiles for QA automation.
Key Takeaways
- Track heat input uniformity across WAAM layers without intrusive sensors.
- Detect cooling delays that correlate with porosity, undercuts, and lack of fusion.
- Feed thermal data into ISO 17635 compliant QA reports for additive cells.
Deploy with Therness
- Pair HeatCore™ thermography with DuoSense AI™ for multi-modal WAAM monitoring.
- Automate CAPA triggers in your QMS when thermal anomalies exceed limits.
- Scale templates across multiple additive cells with centralized dashboards.
Reading the heat, not just the arc
Where a visible-light clip shows you the arc, the thermal view shows the energy it leaves behind. In false colour the fresh bead reads as a bright ridge trailing a cooling tail, and the length of that tail is a direct readout of heat input: a tail that keeps stretching, layer after layer, means the wall is no longer shedding heat fast enough between passes. Localised bright spots mark re-entrant corners and direction changes where the torch lingers and dilution creeps up, while a bead that cools too slowly is where porosity and lack of inter-layer fusion tend to nucleate. Because the measurement is radiometric rather than a colour overlay, the same footage can be graded automatically against temperature limits — provided the camera field of view and framing are set up to see the whole build. That turns a DED wall into per-layer QA evidence instead of a part sectioned only after the fact.
Transcript (short)
Show transcript
This clip shows thermal monitoring during a WAAM/DED build. The thermal view makes bead consistency, heat distribution, and cooling behavior visible across layers. By tracking hotspots and cooling delays, teams can tune travel speed and wire feed, verify inter-layer fusion, and produce traceable QA evidence for additive cells.
