Speeding up mesoscale thermal simulations of powder bed additive manufacturing thanks to the forward Euler time-integration scheme: A critical assessment

Abstract

This work addresses the mesoscale conduction-based modelling of Powder Bed Fusion for metallic materials. The forward Euler (explicit) time integration strategy is thoroughly benchmarked for the first time in a Powder Bed Fusion simulation. We also compare the computational times of explicit and implicit schemes when applied to an experimentally validated Powder Bed Fusion simulation. We demonstrate that the use of the former scheme results in considerable speedups (20 to 100) without noticeable loss of accuracy. We furthermore propose a Powder Bed Fusion-dedicated procedure to estimate the maximum allowable time step size of the explicit scheme.