Vibration assisted robotic hot-wire gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) for additive manufacturing of large metallic parts

Most of the metal additive manufacturing technologies are focused on high cost and high end applications. There is in need, a low cost additive manufacturing technology suitable for low and high end metallic applications. Robotic automated welding can be considered as an alternative to manufactured large scale metal parts with layer by layer approach. However, many obstacles have to be overcome to make it viable technology in additive manufacturing industry. A Robotic hot-wire Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) with low frequency vibrating filler wire has been used to deposit a metallic alloy. Different trials of weld-on-bead experiments were performed to obtain the desired envelop of the melt pool shape for build parts with low manufacturing costs and low build times.