Deep Learning for Process Monitoring and Defect Detection of Laser-Based Powder Bed Fusion of Polymers

Maintaining consistent part quality remains a critical challenge in industrial additive manufacturing, particularly in laser-based powder bed fusion of polymers (PBF-LB/P), where crystallization-driven thermal instabilities, governed by isothermal crystallization within a narrow sintering window, precipitate defects such as curling, warping, and delamination. In contrast to metal-based systems dominated by melt-pool hydrodynamics, polymer PBF-LB/P requires monitoring strategies capable of resolving subtle spatio-temporal thermal deviations under realistic industrial operating conditions. Although machine learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has demonstrated efficacy in defect detection, a structured evaluation of heterogeneous modeling paradigms and their deployment feasibility in polymer PBF-LB/P remains limited. This study presents a systematic cross-paradigm assessment of unsupervised anomaly detection (autoencoders and generative adversarial networks), supervised CNN classifiers (VGG-16, ResNet50, and Xception), hybrid CNN-LSTM architectures, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) using 76,450 synchronized thermal and RGB images acquired from a commercial industrial system operating under closed control constraints. CNN-based models enable frame- and sequence-level defect classification, whereas the PINN component complements detection by providing physically consistent thermal-field regression. The results reveal quantifiable trade-offs between detection performance, temporal robustness, physical consistency, and algorithmic complexity. Pre-trained CNNs achieve up to 99.09% frame-level accuracy but impose a substantial computational burden for edge deployment. The PINN model attains an RMSE of approximately 27 K under quasi-isothermal process conditions, supporting trend-level thermal monitoring. A lightweight hybrid CNN achieves 99.7% validation accuracy with 1860 parameters and a CPU-benchmarked forward-pass inference time of 1.6 ms (excluding sensor acquisition latency). Collectively, this study establishes a rigorously benchmarked, scalable, and resource-efficient deep-learning framework tailored to crystallization-dominated polymer PBF-LB/P, providing a technically grounded basis for real-time industrial quality monitoring.