**6. Most common defects in WAAM components**

It has been seen that WAAM is a welding based fabrication method and components are being made to any shape and size according to the requirements. Therefore, everyone might think that the properties of WAAM fabricated components would match with the conventional welding process. But this fact is not true because the welding process will be carried out for many purposes such as different weld joining and weld cladding, etc. Almost in all the like cases, it is obvious that the weld bead would be limited to only a single in most of the cases and if needed, in peculiar cases few weld beads would be needed to accomplish the process needs. The WAAM case especially while fabricating stainless steel components is entirely different because of the reason that the entire component is manufactured by depositing the weld beads. In this case, many more weld beads to be deposited especially in layers according to the component being fabricated [11]. Therefore, the weld beads may get different properties than the normal welding. There is a strong possibility of more defects in WAAM fabricated components.

Though the meaning of these weld defects in WAAM components are similar to the welding process, it should be understood that there is highly possible to receive more amount of weld defects here since many more required number of weld beads are accumulated together to form the final component. As the components are fabricated with defects by WAAM, it is very tedious to meet the quality and performance-wise factors with the components manufactured in conventional methods or traditional AM processes. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to look for options to reduce these defects during the fabrication of metal components in WAAM [14]. The most common possible few of the weld defects in WAAM based

**Figure 5.** *Various defects in WAAM components.*

fabricated components are listed below. Also, the weld defects that arise during WAAM fabrication are represented in **Figure 5**.

