A Parametric Study Investigating the Effect of Bead Morphologies of SS316L Through the GMAW Process

In the present study, the gas metal arc welding (GMAW) process was used to investigate the effect of bead morphologies of SS316L. Single-layer deposition forms the base for manufacturing metal additive structures using a GMAW-based wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) process. Thus, the current work focused on the analysis of bead morphologies of SS316L through single-layer depositions. Experimental trials were conducted using Taguchi’s L9 approach with travel speed (TS), gas mixture ratio (GMR), and voltage as input WAAM variables, and bead width (BW) and bead height (BH) as output responses. The effect of WAAM variables on output measures was studied using main effect plots. The relevance and reliability of the derived regressions were verified using ANOVA analysis. For the BH response, TS was found to be the most significant factor, followed by voltage, while GMR did not have any contributing impact on the output response variable. For the BW response, voltage was found to be the largest contributing factor, followed by GMR and TS. The R2 values were measured at 0.9276 and 0.9962 for BH and BW, respectively. The outcomes proved that the model fits the data well and can successfully predict new observations, as the R2 values for all responses were near one. Lastly, the best input set of WAAM variables was determined for individual output variables.