Selective Laser Melting High Performance Modeling

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) of metals is a recent additive manufacturing technology involving melting of a powder bed by a laser beam and the solidification of the melt layer by layer. Such process involves a wide range of physical phenomena and it is controlled by a large number of process parameters defined by the user. Gaining knowledge and defining a processing window using experiments can be time consuming. Using experimentally validated physical phenomena modeling may thus be a good alternative. However, the process characteristics give birth to computationally heavy models. Hence, specific methods have to be used in order to limit the computational load to an affordable level. A Finite Element Model (FEM) was implemented to calculate the thermal field throughout a simplified part built by SLM in stainless steel. The model includes features such as element birth (for material addition modeling) and adaptive refinement (automatic computation of a finer mesh where needed) to address the computational issues. Computational experiments were performed on simple and reduced samples. The model results are in good agreement with data from literature in terms of temperature and melt pool geometry. They were obtained in reasonable times (order of magnitude of several hours) using a regular desktop computer.