Development of Simulation Tools for Selective Laser Melting Additive Manufacturing
Abstract
Two simulations tools have been developed to simulate selective laser melting. One is based on a
multiphase flow solver with dynamic mesh adaptation and massive parallelism. The simulation
tool is based on a first-principles approach to simulate complex additive manufacturing processes
at the entire built part/component level. The developed model takes into account of heating,
melting, powder-to-solid volumetric consolidation, cooling, as well as solidification and shrinkage
that are often ignored in current simulation tools. The second tool is to solve the heat equation only
without considering the flow field and volumetric changes. In both tools laser is modeled as a heat
source. The reported work is our first step toward the development of a complete software suite
that can be executed rapidly on workstations and clusters with accelerators. The simulation tool
can provide AM practitioners and researchers from industry and academic a fast and accurate
simulation-based approach to replace current trial-and-error based practices in industry for process
and material development.