Modeling of thermal and solidification behavior during laser additive manufacturing of AlSi10Mg alloy powders and its experimental validation

In the present era, the laser additive manufacturing process is widely adopted in the manufacturing sector to produce near net shape components with minimum wastage of raw materials. Direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) is one of the laser additive manufacturing techniques which has received the most attention, as it builds the parts directly from metal or alloy powders. However, the quality of the components produced by DMLS has hindered its use on a larger scale. The process parameters in the DMLS process directly influence the quality of the building part. So, a better understanding of the influence of process parameters on build parts can provide insight to get high-quality products. In the present study, a three-dimensional transient heat transfer model was developed to simulate the temperature field and molten pool profile using the ansys 17.0 platform. The temperature distribution, melt pool dimension, solidification rate, cooling rate, and structural morphology are investigated with the variation of input laser energy. From the investigation, it was observed that the temperature of the powder bed and melt pool dimensions such as length, width, and depth increases with an increase in input laser energy. The cooling rate also increases with a decrease in laser energy input. Further, the developed model is validated to verify the accuracy and the simulated results are quite agreed with the analytical as well as experimental results.