Structural integrity is a crucial aspect of engineering components, particularly in the field of additive manufacturing (AM). Surface roughness is a vital parameter that significantly influences the structural integrity of additively manufactured parts. This research work focuses on the prediction of the surface roughness of additive-manufactured polylactic acid (PLA) specimens using eight different supervised machine learning regression-based algorithms. For the first time, explainable AI techniques are employed to enhance the interpretability of the machine learning models. The nine algorithms used in this study are Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, AdaBoost, CatBoost, Decision Tree, the Extra Tree Regressor, the Explainable Boosting Model (EBM), and the Gradient Boosting Regressor. This study analyzes the performance of these algorithms to predict the surface roughness of PLA specimens, while also investigating the impacts of individual input parameters through explainable AI methods. The experimental results indicate that the XGBoost algorithm outperforms the other algorithms with the highest coefficient of determination value of 0.9634. This value demonstrates that the XGBoost algorithm provides the most accurate predictions for surface roughness compared with other algorithms. This study also provides a comparative analysis of the performance of all the algorithms used in this study, along with insights derived from explainable AI techniques.

Image processing algorithms are finding various applications in manufacturing and materials industries such as identification of cracks in the fabricated samples, calculating the geometrical properties of the given microstructure, presence of surface defects, etc. The present work deals with the application of Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) algorithm for improving the quality of the microstructure images of the Friction Stir Welded joints. The obtained results showed that the obtained value of quantitative metric features such as Entropy value and RMS Contrast value were high which resulted in enhanced microstructure images.

Nowadays, manufacturing sectors harness the power of machine learning and data science algorithms to make predictions of the optimization of mechanical and microstructure properties of fabricated mechanical components. The application of these algorithms reduces the experimental cost beside leads to reduce the time of experiments. The present research work is based on the depth of penetration prediction using supervised machine learning algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM), random forest algorithm, and robust regression algorithm. A friction stir spot welding (FSSW) was used to join two specimens of AA1230 aluminum alloys. The dataset consists of three input parameters: rotational speed (rpm), dwelling time (s), and axial load (kN), on which the machine learning models were trained and tested. The robust regression machine learning algorithm outperformed the rest algorithms by resulting in the coefficient of determination of 0.96. The second-best algorithm is the support vector machine algorithm, which has a value of 0.895 on the testing dataset. The research work also highlights the application of image processing techniques to find the geometrical features of the weld formation. The eroding and dilating procedures were carried out by the kernel size (3, 3) of type int 8. The results showed that the used algorithms can be considered to calculate the area, major/minor axis lengths, and the perimeter of the FSSW samples.

Artificial-intelligence-based algorithms are used in manufacturing to automate difficult activities and discover workflow or process patterns that had never been noticed before. Recent studies deal with the forecasting of the fracture location in dissimilar friction-stir-welded AA5754–C11000 alloys. Four types of supervised machine-learning-based classification algorithms i.e., decision tree, logistic classification, random forest, and AdaBoost were implemented. Additionally, in the present work, for the first time, a neurobiological-based unsupervised machine learning algorithm, i.e., self-organizing map (SOM) neural network, is implemented for determining the fracture location in dissimilar friction-stir-welded AA5754–C11000 alloys. Tool shoulder diameter (mm), tool rotational speed (RPM), and tool traverse speed (mm/min) are input parameters, while the fracture location, i.e., whether the specimen’s fracture is in the thermo-mechanically affected zone (TMAZ) of copper, or if it fractures in the TMAZ of aluminium. The results show that out of all implemented algorithms, the SOM algorithm is able to predict the fracture location with the highest accuracy of 96.92%.

The research paper presents a novel approach to optimizing the tensile stress of Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (TPMS) structures through machine learning and Simulated Annealing (SA). The study evaluates the performance of Random Forest, Decision Tree, and XGBoost models in predicting tensile stress, using a dataset generated from finite element analysis of TPMS models. The objective function minimized the negative R-squared value on the validation set to enhance model accuracy. The SA-XGBoost model outperformed the others, achieving an R-squared (R²) value of 0.96. In contrast, the SA-Random Forest model achieved an R² of 0.89 while the SA-Decision Tree model exhibited greater fluctuations in validation scores. This demonstrates that the SA-XGBoost model is most effective in capturing the complex relationships within the data. The integration of SA helps in optimizing the hyperparameters of these machine learning models, thereby enhancing their predictive capabilities.