Numerical modelling of heat transfer and experimental validation in powder-bed fusion with the virtual domain approximation

Eric Neiva; Michele Chiumenti; Miguel Cervera; Emilio Salsi; Gabriele Piscopo; Santiago Badia; Alberto F. Martín; Zhuoer Chen; Caroline Lee; Christopher Davies

doi:10.1016/j.finel.2019.103343

Numerical modelling of heat transfer and experimental validation in powder-bed fusion with the virtual domain approximation
Journal article, 2020

Among metal additive manufacturing technologies, powder-bed fusion features very thin layers and rapid solidification rates, leading to long build jobs and a highly localized process. Many efforts are being devoted to accelerate simulation times for practical industrial applications. The new approach suggested here, the virtual domain approximation, is a physics-based rationale for spatial reduction of the domain in the thermal finite-element analysis at the part scale. Computational experiments address, among others, validation against a large physical experiment of 17.5 [cm3] of deposited volume in 647 layers. For fast and automatic parameter estimation at such level of complexity, a high-performance computing framework is employed. It couples FEMPAR-AM, a specialized parallel finite-element software, with Dakota, for the parametric exploration. Compared to previous state-of-the-art, this formulation provides higher accuracy at the same computational cost. This sets the path to a fully virtualized model, considering an upwards-moving domain covering the last printed layers.

Selective laser melting (SLM)

Finite elements (FE)

Additive manufacturing (AM)

Powder-bed fusion (PBF)

Thermal analysis

High performance computing (HPC)