Physics-guided spatiotemporal approach for melt pool size prediction in laser powder bed fusion

This study first proposes a physics-guided spatiotemporal graph. The melt pool temporal feature nodes and spatial feature nodes are extracted from melt pool images based on spatiotemporal correlations. These feature points are treated as graph nodes, and the edge weights in the graph are calculated based on an analytical heat transfer model. It supplements the physical information of accumulated heat. Based on this, the graph convolutional network (GCN) is used to extract spatiotemporal information of heat transfer, and the long short-term memory (LSTM) is used to capture the evolution patterns of the melt pool. Thus, a melt pool spatiotemporal feature extraction model is constructed for melt pool size prediction. The model achieves prediction errors within 12% for the melt pool area and 8.5% for the melt pool perimeter. Subsequently, interpretability analysis indicates that the physics-guided approach enhances the model's learning ability for the cumulative contribution of heat from neighboring tracks.