Modeling and experimental validation of an immersed thermo-mechanical part-scale analysis for laser powder bed fusion processes

Abstract

The capability of correctly predicting part deflections after support removal is important to assess the quality of a final artifact produced by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) technology. The finite element method is usually employed to perform part-scale thermo-mechanical analysis to estimate the final distortion of 3D printed parts. Due to the high flexibility of LPBF additive manufacturing, most of the components produced by means of such a technology have an optimized shape and complex geometrical features. Consequently, the process of generating an analysis suitable mesh starting from the original 3D virtual model turns out to be a non-trivial task. Immersed boundary methods represent a possible solution to perform accurate process simulation without the meshing burden. In this work, an immersed numerical framework to perform thermo-mechanical part-scale analysis is experimentally validated by means of part deflection measurements obtained for a single-cantilever structure after support removal. The comparison between simulation and experiment shows that the proposed numerical framework is able to deliver results with an almost perfect correlation to the measured data and a maximum relative error below 5%.