Term of Award

Summer 2017

Degree Name

Master of Science in Applied Engineering (M.S.A.E.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Committee Chair

Bishal Silwal

Committee Member 1

Shaowen Xu

Committee Member 2

Guanghsu Chang

Abstract

Within the past years, in the field of manufacturing, new technologies known as 3D printing or rapid prototyping have been used to great success, where traditional manufacturing methods have fallen short. The many additive manufacturing processes create parts by depositing material only where the final structure resides, which greatly reduces the material waste from subtractive manufacturing, while being more flexible and ready to use than casting or die forming techniques. Within the field of additive manufacturing, processes which produce metal parts have been slower to enter the market, due to the complexity of the equipment needed to deposit metal. Current system use expensive and delicate lasers or electron beams to melt or sinter the metal inside a sealed chamber. Arc welding has existed for over a hundred years, and has recently been used as an additive manufacturing technique by several research institutes and universities. The use of a gas tungsten arc welding system with an incorporated vibratory wire feed effect, in conjunction with a hot wire feeding system, has a potential to create an arc-based additive manufacturing (ABAM) process. If uniform shape and relative layer height of GTAW ABAM can be refined to a point where printed parts have repeatable characteristics and lower manufacturing costs to that of traditionally manufactured components then it can be used as an efficient alternative process to produce small quantities or prototype components. The details of the automated GTAW system, overview of literature pertaining to metal additive manufacturing, the experimental setup used to carry out testing of what effects several key process parameters have on the geometry and shape of the weld deposition, and the results of these tests are presented and discussed. A scope of future work for the system, which addresses current problems of the system and offers further refinement of the process is laid out.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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