Molten pool structure and temperature flow behavior of green-laser powder bed fusion pure copper

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing(AM) is an advanced direct-manufacturing technology, based on the discrete-stacking principle. Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) is one of the most promising technologies in the field of metal AM, with the characteristics of fabricating parts with complex shapes directly. For L-PBF equipment , the core device is lasers, and almost all L-PBF printers are currently equipped with infrared laser. However, due to too low absorption rate of the pure copper surface to infrared laser and high thermal conductivity between pure copper, it is extremely challenging to fabricate pure copper by traditional infrared-laser powder bed fusion(IR L-PFB). In this work, green-laser was applied to replace traditional infrared laser during L-PBF process, molten pool structure and temperature flow behavior of Green-Laser powder bed additive manufacturing pure copper was studied by mesoscopic simulation. Here we show that green-laser greatly improved the absorption rate of the pure copper surface, and the result showed that with lower cost laser process parameters (lower laser power 300W and larger hatching space 0.08 mm), pure copper parts with smoother surface, no-remelting and no obvious defects could be fabricated successfully.