On the Fidelity of the Scaling Laws for Melt Pool Depth Analysis During Laser Powder Bed Fusion

In additive manufacturing, the part quality is highly dependent on process parameters. The morphology of the melt pool (depth and width) is highly affected by process parameter selection. Available scaling laws more or less overestimate or underestimate melt pool dimensions with the similar order of magnitudes in the errors. Depending on melt pool mode, either conduction or keyhole, and moving from one material to another, scaling laws might not perform well. To further analyze the performance of the available scaling laws, in this work, melt pool depth obtained from experiments is tested against three well-known scaling laws. The fidelity and error associated with the scaling laws are analyzed and discussed. To improve the accuracy of the prediction, we revised three scaling laws and the results are discussed. While in some cases the scaling laws might have reasonable errors roughly lower than 50%, in other cases, errors are very high signifying missing physics from the predictions. The revised version of the scaling laws improves the fidelity of the predictions. The analysis shows a careful attention is required when using scaling laws to avoid high percentage of error.