Metal additive manufacturing is an important tool for the creation of cost effective and environmentally friendly components for the future of the aerospace industry. Newly developed methods such as Direct Energy Deposition, Laser Beam Wire (DEDLB/w) have the potential to quickly and effciently manufacture aircraft engine components of high quality when utilising the correct set of process parameters. Establishing these parameters is a challenging task as product defects can be diffcult to detect and localise during the DEDLB/w process. This thesis explores the possibility of detecting crack type defects during the additive manufacturing of Nickel-Based Superalloy components using in process acoustic emission inspection and hierarchical clustering to evaluate DEDLB/w process parameter sets. After observing numerous material depositions made using DEDLB/w, crack-like signals were observed and clustered using features derived from Acoustic Emission (AE) data. The results were then evaluated and validated using X-Ray and X-Ray Computed Tomography (µCT) inspection. Crack-like acoustic emissions were recorded from depositions in which cracks were later found using X-rayand µCT inspection, and these emissions were successfully clustered over multiple depositions using statistical analysis and agglomerative clustering.