Effect of path strategies on metallic parts manufactured by additive process

Metal deposition processing is well known for cladding by laser or welding process. Nevertheless, these systems are not optimized for direct manufacturing. One of the main lock is the need of dedicated CAD/CAM systems to slice and generate path strategies. Research at the IRCCYN laboratory (France) focus on the impact of cladding or welding head programming on dimensional properties and microstructure of the manufactured parts. In this context, path strategies are studied and different strategies are proposed and compared. This paper presents results for welding path strategies. The integration of deposition head on a 6 axis robot system was used to improve slicing strategies and parts.