Edge-cloud cooperation driven surface roughness classification method for selective laser melting

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology is extensively utilized in aerospace and industrial manufacturing. However, parts built using AM are susceptible to spheroidization, porosity, cracks, and poor surface quality, making it difficult to establish an actionable product quality degree. Hence, developing a reasonable method to equate product quality with a new degree and further analyzing the product quality based on these standards has proven effective for enhancing part quality in AM. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a surface roughness classification method that utilizes surface roughness analysis and sample enhancement. This method leverages edge cloud cooperation to efficiently analyze and integrate data from different sensors, enabling real-time monitoring and adjustment of the manufacturing process. Subsequently, the quality degree analysis system was developed utilizing matter-element extension cloud model. Furthermore, a bidirectional-gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) based model for quality classification and recognition has been established, with Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) employed for sample enhancement to address the issue of imbalanced column classification and to enhance the accuracy of both classification and recognition. Finally, the results obtained from this case study demonstrate through comparative experiments that the proposed method for classifying surface roughness can accurately identify 98% of prepared samples.