3D thermal simulation of powder bed fusion additive manufacturing of stainless steel

Laser Additive Manufacturing (AM) is gaining considerable attention nowadays for medical and aerospace applications because of the controlled density of fabricated parts. The density of AMed parts mainly depends on the process parameters such as the laser power, scan speed, number of layers, layer thickness etc. These process parameters go on to affect the microstructure of the 3D printed part. In this study, an effort has been made to investigate the three-dimensional temperature distribution in the Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) AM of stainless steel (SS316 alloy) using Simufact Additive (Ver. 4.1) - a commercial finite element based simulation tool. The effect of temperature dependent properties of SS316 and the PBF process parameters (laser power, scan speed and recoater time) on the temperature distribution was studied interactively. The simulated results were found in accordance to that reported in the literature. This study is likely to be helpful in understanding the thermal behavior of PBF AMed steels which affects the microstructure and consequently the properties of the final component. This work is aimed at supporting the decision-making process towards high fidelity AM, with minimum number of trial runs and at a comparatively lower cost. A new modelling and solution approach using an interactive and user-friendly commercial software is presented which allows the modelling of the complex behavior of the metal AM process and its parametric study.