Underlying Mechanisms for Developing Process Signatures in Manufacturing

The concept of Process Signatures allows the reliable and knowledge-based prediction of material modifications (e.g., changes of hardness, residual stress, microstructure and chemical composition) researchers in the field of surface integrity, and manufacturing technologies have already been seeking for a long time. A Process Signature is based on the correlation between the internal material loads in manufacturing processes (e.g., stress, strain, temperature) and the resulting material modifications. The target of this paper is to get a comprehensive view on the development of single Process Signature Components for processes with different predominant impacts. Particularly, a mechanism-based approach leading to significant descriptives of internal material loads for a specific material modification is proposed. By this, a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms leading to changes of the workpiece surface layer properties caused by manufacturing processes is provided. The challenging identification of significant mechanisms and descriptives of internal material loads is highlighted for each process, and supporting measurement methods and modeling approaches are presented. Process Signatures are expected to enable the solution of the so-called inverse problem in manufacturing.