Physics-Informed Machine Learning Regulated by Finite Element Analysis for Simulation Acceleration of Laser Powder Bed Fusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces FEA-PINN, a physics-informed neural network framework regulated by finite element analysis, to accelerate thermal simulations in laser powder bed fusion while maintaining high accuracy and reducing computational costs.

Contribution

The study develops a novel FEA-PINN framework with dynamic material updating and FEA-based correction to efficiently simulate LPBF processes with high accuracy.

Findings

FEA-PINN achieves FEA-level accuracy in thermal predictions.

The framework significantly reduces computational time compared to traditional FEA.

Transfer learning enables generalization to new process parameters.

Abstract

Efficient simulation of Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is crucial for process prediction due to the lasting issue of high computation cost using traditional numerical methods such as finite element analysis (FEA). This study presents an efficient modeling framework termed FEA-Regulated Physics-Informed Neural Network (FEA-PINN) to accelerate the thermal field prediction in a LPBF process while maintaining the FEA accuracy. A novel dynamic material updating strategy is developed to capture the dynamic phase change of powder-liquid-solid in the PINN model. The PINN model incorporates temperature-dependent material properties and phase change behavior using the apparent heat capacity method. While the PINN model demonstrates high accuracy with a small training data and enables generalization of new process parameters via transfer learning, it faces the challenge of high computation cost in time-dependent problems due to the residual accumulation. To overcome this issue, the FEA-PINN framework integrates corrective FEA simulations during inference to enforce physical consistency and reduce error drift. A comparative analysis shows that FEA-PINN achieves equivalent accuracy to FEA while significantly reducing computational cost. The framework has been validated using the benchmark FEA data and demonstrated through single-track scanning in LPBF.