TOWARDS EFFICIENT THERMAL SIMULATION OF POWDER BED FUSION ON PATH LEVEL

Published

August 15, 2019

Author(s)

Paul W. Witherell

Abstract

As a widely used additive manufacturing (AM) technology to produce metallic parts, powder bed fusion (PBF) is driven by a moving heat source. Thermal simulation is a critical tool to understand the mappings between manufacturing parameters (e.g. laser power and scan speed) and process characteristics (e.g. geometry of the melt pool). The thermal simulation of the PBF process is challenging due the physical and geometric complexities of the manufacturing process. Conventional approaches such as powder-based simulations (e.g. DEM) and voxel-based simulations (e.g. FEM) are able to provide valuable insight into process physics, but are not well-suited to handle realistic manufacturing plans due to the high computational complexity. As a step toward achieving insight into the fabrication of a part, we propose a new meso-scale thermal simulation built on the path-level interactions described by a typical process plan. In our model, the laser scan path is discretized into elements, and each element represents the newly melted material by the laser scan in a short period of time. An element growth mechanism is introduced to simulate the evolution of the melt pool and its thermal characteristics during the manufacturing process. The proposed simulation reduces computational demands by attempting to capture the most important thermal effects developed during the manufacturing process, including laser energy absorption, thermal interaction between adjacent elements and elements with powder bed (and underneath substrate), thermal convection and radiation, and powder melting.

Conference Dates

August 18-21, 2019

Conference Location

Anaheim, CA

Conference Title

International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering
Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Additive Manufacturing, Modeling

Citation

Witherell, P. (2019), TOWARDS EFFICIENT THERMAL SIMULATION OF POWDER BED FUSION ON PATH LEVEL, International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Anaheim, CA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=927735 (Accessed April 19, 2024)