Forming accuracy improvement in wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM): a review

Purpose This paper aims to anticipate the possible development direction of WAAM. For large-scale and complex components, the material loss and cycle time of wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) are lower than those of conventional manufacturing. However, the high-precision WAAM currently requires longer cycle times for correcting dimensional errors. Therefore, new technologies need to be developed to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency WAAM. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyses the innovations in high-precision WAAM in the past five years from a mechanistic point of view. Findings Controlling heat to improve precision is an effective method. Methods of heat control include reducing the amount of heat entering the deposited interlayer or transferring the accumulated heat out of the interlayer in time. Based on this, an effective and highly precise WAAM is achievable in combination with multi-scale sensors and a complete expert system. Originality/value Therefore, a development direction for intelligent WAAM is proposed. Using the optimised process parameters based on machine learning, adjusting the parameters according to the sensors’ in-process feedback, achieving heat control and high precision manufacturing.