Computational thermal multi-phase flow for metal additive manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent computational methods for simulating thermal multi-phase flows in metal additive manufacturing, focusing on improving accuracy and robustness in predicting complex phenomena.

Contribution

Introduces a mixed interface-capturing/interface-tracking framework and a physics-based deposit geometry model for better simulation of AM processes.

Findings

The framework accurately predicts gas-metal interface dynamics.

Simulations match experimental measurements across multiple quantities.

The methods reveal critical unmeasurable quantities for process understanding.

Abstract

Thermal multi-phase flow simulations are indispensable to understanding the multi-scale and multi-physics phenomena in metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes, yet accurate and robust predictions remain challenging. This book chapter summarizes the recent method development at UIUC for simulating thermal multiphase flows in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) and directed energy deposition (DED) processes. Two main method developments are discussed. The first is a mixed interface-capturing/interface-tracking computational framework aiming to explicitly treat the gas-metal interface without mesh motion/re-meshing. The second is a physics-based and non-empirical deposit geometry model for DED processes. The proposed framework's accuracy is assessed by thoroughly comparing the simulated results against experimental measurements on various quantities. We also report critical quantities that experiments can not measure to show the predictive capability of the developed methods.