2025/01/30 by Magdalena Schreter-Fleischhacker, Schreter-Fleischhacker, Magdalena, Nils Much +9 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Additive Manufacturing Materials and Processes #Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies #Aluminum Alloys Composites Properties #Computational Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Finance #and Science (cs.CE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.18781
openalex publication_date 2025/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/02/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Metal additive manufacturing via laser-based powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/M) faces performance-critical challenges due to complex melt pool and vapor dynamics, often oversimplified by computational models that neglect crucial aspects, such as vapor jet formation. To address this limitation, we propose a consistent computational multi-physics mesoscale model to study melt pool dynamics, laser-induced evaporation, and vapor flow. In addition to the evaporation-induced pressure jump, we also resolve the evaporation-induced volume expansion and the resulting velocity jump at the liquid--vapor interface. We use an anisothermal incompressible Navier--Stokes solver extended by a conservative diffuse level-set framework and integrate it into a matrix-free adaptive finite element framework. To ensure accurate physical solutions despite extreme density, pressure and velocity gradients across the diffuse liquid--vapor interface, we employ consistent interface source term formulations developed in our previous work. These formulations consider projection operations to extend solution variables from the sharp liquid--vapor interface into the computational domain. Benchmark examples, including film boiling, confirm the accuracy and versatility of the model. As a key result, we demonstrate the model's ability to capture the strong coupling between melt and vapor flow dynamics in PBF-LB/M based on simulations of stationary laser illumination on a metal plate. Additionally, we show the derivation of the well-known Anisimov model and extend it to a new hybrid model. This hybrid model, together with consistent interface source term formulations, especially for the level-set transport velocity, enables PBF-LB/M simulations that combine accurate physical results with the robustness of an incompressible, diffuse-interface computational modeling framework.