A New Dynamic Mesh Method Applied to the Simulation of Selective Laser Melting

The process of Selective Laser Melting (SLM) involves the moving of a laser beam across a powder bed to melt material layer by layer. From the standpoint of modeling, this simple procedure is complicated to capture accurately. SLM involves very high laser intensity values, on the order of 1010 W/m2 and a Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) that is orders of magnitude less than the dimensions of the platform. Many computational models have been developed to study temperature evolution in SLM, but most of these models only simulate a small part of the problem with a fine mesh or the entire problem using a coarse mesh to avoid the computational burdens of meshing the full problem with a fine mesh. In order to accurately capture the details of temperature evolution anywhere in a full-sized part located anywhere in the build platform, in an efficient manner, a new dynamic moving mesh method has been developed and implemented in both ANSYS and in a unique Matlab code. This dynamic mesh has been shown to provide significant computational enhancements over other solution methodologies, while enabling fine-scale solutions anywhere in the domain space. A detailed comparison between various ways of solving the SLM problem has been carried out to compare modeling approaches.