Forming Characteristics of Additive Manufacturing Process by Rotating Arc

In order to consider both the forming rate and quality of arc additive manufacturing, The rotating arc was applied to additive manufacturing in the paper and the experiments were conducted on it. Firstly, the effect of process parameters on the surface forming quality of single deposition bead was investigated and obtained the well-formed process ranges. On this basis, the effect of the rotating frequency on the forming characteristics of the single-layer multi-bead additive deposition layer was investigated. The deposited layers were uniform in width and no obvious defects, and as the rotating frequency increased, the surface flatness of the deposited layers became worse, the area of the heat affected zone between beads decreased, and the penetration increased. When the rotating frequency was 5 Hz, the surface flatness and penetration of the deposited layer were only 30% and 49% of the conventional non-rotating arc additive method. The results showed that the increase of arc rotating frequency inhibited the lateral heat conduction inside the deposited layer and prevented the molten metal from spreading to the previous deposition bead, which is an important reason for the change of deposited layer forming characteristics. The validation experiment showed that the rotating arc additive manufacturing method with the rotating frequency of 5 Hz can effectively improve the forming quality and forming characteristics of formed component.