scholarly journals Analysis of laser–melt pool–powder bed interaction during the selective laser melting of a stainless steel

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 022303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valérie Gunenthiram ◽  
Patrice Peyre ◽  
Matthieu Schneider ◽  
Morgan Dal ◽  
Frédéric Coste ◽  
...  
Materials ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (17) ◽  
pp. 3895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbas Razavykia ◽  
Eugenio Brusa ◽  
Cristiana Delprete ◽  
Reza Yavari

Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes enable their deployment in broad applications from aerospace to art, design, and architecture. Part quality and performance are the main concerns during AM processes execution that the achievement of adequate characteristics can be guaranteed, considering a wide range of influencing factors, such as process parameters, material, environment, measurement, and operators training. Investigating the effects of not only the influential AM processes variables but also their interactions and coupled impacts are essential to process optimization which requires huge efforts to be made. Therefore, numerical simulation can be an effective tool that facilities the evaluation of the AM processes principles. Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is a widespread Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) AM process that due to its superior advantages, such as capability to print complex and highly customized components, which leads to an increasing attention paid by industries and academia. Temperature distribution and melt pool dynamics have paramount importance to be well simulated and correlated by part quality in terms of surface finish, induced residual stress and microstructure evolution during SLM. Summarizing numerical simulations of SLM in this survey is pointed out as one important research perspective as well as exploring the contribution of adopted approaches and practices. This review survey has been organized to give an overview of AM processes such as extrusion, photopolymerization, material jetting, laminated object manufacturing, and powder bed fusion. And in particular is targeted to discuss the conducted numerical simulation of SLM to illustrate a uniform picture of existing nonproprietary approaches to predict the heat transfer, melt pool behavior, microstructure and residual stresses analysis.


Author(s):  
Diego Augusto de Moraes ◽  
Aleksander Czekanski

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process is a Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) technique, which has shown significantly growth in the recent years. The demand for this process is justified by the versatility and ease in manufacturing the parts from 3D models as well for the increased complexity of engineered parts generated from topology or shape optimization. Automotive, aerospace, medical and aviation industries are taking great advantage of this process due the unique geometry characteristics found in the components. To enhance the benefits of SLM, a vital task is to analyze the laser power input impact on the temperature distribution through the powder bed, important for posterior residual stresses analysis. The Finite Element Method proposed in this study is a transient thermal model, able to predict temperature distribution through different sections of the powder bed when performing a single track of the laser scanning. Furthermore, the impact of the laser power input is carried out utilizing SS 304L, a low cost Stainless Steel alloy that can be employed in the SLM process, in order to determine the influence on the temperature distribution along the different cross sections.


Metals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhonghua Li ◽  
Zezhou Kuai ◽  
Peikang Bai ◽  
Yunfei Nie ◽  
Guang Fu ◽  
...  

The multi-beam selective laser forming system is a new type of powder bed laser forming equipment that is different from single-laser selective laser melting (SLM) printers. It is a new generation for a metal powder material moulding process that has high efficiency, large size and batch manufacturing. It is a new development of a powder bed laser forming process trend. In this paper, the microstructure and tensile properties of both the multi-laser-formed AlSi10Mg isolated and overlap areas are studied to ensure that the parts can achieve perfect seamless splicing and to identify whether the parts in different regions have the same performance. It was discovered that as the number of scans increases, the depth and width of the melt pool and microscopic grain structure in the overlap zone increase. The preferential crystallite growth orientation reaches the (200) plane. A small amount of smooth surface appeared at the fracture of the overlap area of the two scans, the dimples were reduced and the structure became larger, resulting in a decrease in tensile properties.


Author(s):  
Miranda Fateri ◽  
Andreas Gebhardt ◽  
Maziar Khosravi

Selective Laser Melting process (SLM) is an important manufacturing method for producing complex geometries which allows for creation of full density parts with similar properties as the bulk material without extensive post processing. In SLM process, laser power, beam focus diameter, and scanning velocity must be precisely set based on the material properties in order to produce dense parts. In this study, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) method is employed in order to simulate and analyze a single layer of 904L Stainless Steel. A three-dimensional transient thermal model of the SLM process based on phase change enthalpy, irradiation scattering, and heat conductivity of powder is developed. The laser beam is modeled as a moving heat flux on the surface of the layer using a fine mesh which allows for a variation of the shape and distribution of the beam. In this manner, various Gaussian distributions are investigated and compared against single and multi-element heat flux sources. The melt pool and temperature distribution in the part are numerically investigated in order to determine the effects of varying laser intensity, scanning velocity as well as preheating temperature. The results of the simulation are verified by comparing the melt pool width as a function of power and velocity against the experimentally obtained results. Lastly, 3D objects are fabricated with a SLM 50 Desktop machine using the acquired optimized process parameters.


Author(s):  
Zhibo Luo ◽  
Yaoyao Fiona Zhao

Selective laser melting is one of the powder bed fusion processes which fabricates a part through layer-wised method. Due to the ability to build a customized and complex part, selective laser melting process has been broadly studied in academic and applied in industry. However, rapidly changed thermal cycles and extremely high-temperature gradients among the melt pool induce a periodically changed thermal stress in solidified layers and finally result in a distorted part. Therefore, the temperature distribution in the melt pool and the size and shape of the melt pool directly determine the mechanical and geometrical property of final part. As experimental trial-and-error method takes a huge amount of cost, different numerical methods have been adopted to estimate the transient temperature and thermal stress distribution in the melt pool and powder bed. The most existing research utilizes the moving Gaussian point heat source to model the profile of the melt pool, which consumes a significant amount of computational cost and cannot be used to implement the part-level simulation. This research proposes a new line heat source to replace the moving point heat source. Some efforts are applied to reduce the computational cost. Specifically, a relatively large step size is used for the line heat source to reduce the number of time steps. In addition, a mesh refinement scheme is adopted to reduce the number of cells in each time step by refining the mesh close to the heat source and coarsening the mesh far away from it. On the other hand, efforts are implemented to increase the accuracy of the simulation result. Temperature-dependent material properties are considered in this FE framework. In addition, material transition among powder, liquid, and solid are incorporated in the developed FE framework. In this study, temperature simulation of one scanning track based on self-developed FE code is applied for Stainless Steel 316L. The simulation results show that the temperature distribution and history of melt pool within line heat source are comparable to that of the moving Gaussian point heat source. While the simulation time is reduced by more than two times depending on the length of line heat input. Therefore, this FE model can be used to numerically investigate the process parameters and help to control the quality of the final part.


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1547
Author(s):  
Syed Zahid Hussain ◽  
Zareena Kausar ◽  
Zafar Ullah Koreshi ◽  
Shakil R. Sheikh ◽  
Hafiz Zia Ur Rehman ◽  
...  

Selective laser melting (SLM), a metal powder fusion additive manufacturing process, has the potential to manufacture complex components for aerospace and biomedical implants. Large-scale adaptation of these technologies is hampered due to the presence of defects such as porosity and part distortion. Nonuniform melt pool size is a major cause of these defects. The melt pool size changes due to heat from the previous powder bed tracks. In this work, the effect of heat sourced from neighbouring tracks was modelled and feedback control was designed. The objective of control is to regulate the melt pool cross-sectional area rejecting the effect of heat from neighbouring tracks within a layer of the powder bed. The SLM process’s thermal model was developed using the energy balance of lumped melt pool volume. The disturbing heat from neighbouring tracks was modelled as the initial temperature of the melt pool. Combining the thermal model with disturbance model resulted in a nonlinear model describing melt pool evolution. The PID, a classical feedback control approach, was used to minimize the effect of intertrack disturbance on the melt pool area. The controller was tuned for the desired melt pool area in a known environment. Simulation results revealed that the proposed controller regulated the desired melt pool area during the scan of multiple tracks of a powder layer within 16 milliseconds and within a length of 0.04 mm reducing laser power by 10% approximately in five tracks. This reduced the chance of pore formation. Hence, it enhances the quality of components manufactured using the SLM process, reducing defects.


Metals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 1003
Author(s):  
Lan Li ◽  
Frank Liou

In this study, thermo-mechanical simulation was conducted to predict thermal and stress behavior in Selective Laser Melting (SLM). Temperature-dependent material properties for processed material 304L stainless steel were incorporated into the model in order to capture the change from powder to fully dense solid stainless steel. Temperature and thermal stress history were tracked under conditions of different parameter sets which were designed to reduce defect formation. The thermal model predicted the temperature history for multi-track scans under different process parameters, such as laser power, effective scanning speed and hatch spacing. Subsequently, the corresponding melt-pool size, solidification rate and temperature gradients could be calculated from simulated temperature data. These three parameters from the simulation were compared with experimental melt pool size, grain structure and cell spacing data obtained from a Renishaw AM250. The experimental data were also used to determine unknown simulation parameters required by the continuum model, e.g., the optical penetration depth and thermal conductivity multiplier for the molten region. This allowed the simulation model to accurately predict melt pool size and solidification structure of SLM 304L stainless steel. Simulated stress showed that the subsequent thermal cyclic melting in successive scanned tracks resulted in alternating compressive and tensile thermal stresses. This work will provide insight for studying microstructure morphology, residual stress and deformations in the SLM process of 304L stainless steel.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Slodczyk ◽  
Alexander Ilin ◽  
Thomas Kiedrowski ◽  
Vasily Ploshikhin

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