3-Dimensional Heat Transfer Modeling for Laser Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing Using Parallel Computing and Adaptive Mesh

Abstract

In this article, an innovative 3-dimensional (3D) heat-transfer finite element parallel-computing model with adaptive mesh capability, named LPBFSim, for Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing is introduced for high precision prediction of melt pool dimensions and part-level process simulations. Numerical modeling can significantly reduce the expense of the sole deployment of trial-and-error experiments for achieving optimal process parameters. The previously developed single-track model [1] is highly accurate to predict melt pool dimensions for different combinations of process parameters. However, without using parallel computing and an adaptive mesh, it is very challenging to scale it up to a multi-track model or even a part-level model due to the high computational cost. The proposed model is parallelized to be able to run on a cluster and aimed to solve this difficulty while keeping all the accuracy from the previous version. Single-track, multi-track, and part-level models have been implemented to demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy.

Keywords: Additive manufacturing, Laser powder bed fusion, Heat transfer modeling, Volumetric heat sources, Parallel computing, Adaptive mesh