From Melt Pool to Microstructure to Mechanical Properties: A Simulative Approach to L-PBF Processed Material Behaviour

An important goal for the additive manufacturing (AM) community is to predict the material-dependent effective mechanical properties of a build-up specimen. In this work three coupled simulations to calculate the mechanical properties of laser-power bed fusion (L-PBF) processed IN718 are used. These values are compared to experimental data from literature. In the future, this approach is going be used for newly designed materials to estimate the expected mechanical properties and the resulting microstructure (As an extra step, the thermophysical properties of the new alloy have to be calculated in advance). The simulation chain to solve this challenge involves the simulation of the melt pool behaviour during the L‑PBF process to obtain the solidification conditions. These are required to then calculate the microstructural growth behaviour with the phase-field method. The resulting microstructure is homogenized to obtain the final effective mechanical properties of the L‑PBF processed material. The simulation results are compared with according results from experiments at each step to verify the approach and each simulation result.