Finite element simulations of temperature distribution and of densification of a titanium powder during metal laser sintering

Metal Laser Sintering (LS) is a powder bed fusion process that can be used to produce manufactured parts of complex shapes directly from metallic powders. One of the major problems of such powder bed fusion processes is that during the continuous movement of the laser beam, temperature distribution becomes inhomogeneous and instable in the powder. It leads to greater residual stresses in the solidified layer. Thus, temperature analyses must be performed to better understand the heating-cooling process of the powder bed as well as the interactions of different laser scanning paths within a sintering pattern. A transient 3D Finite Element (FE) model of the LS process has been developed with the commercial FE code ABAQUS. The model takes into account the different physical phenomena involved in this powder bed fusion technology (including thermal conduction, radiation and convection). A moving thermal source, modeling the laser scan, is implemented with the user scripting subroutine DFLUX in this FE code. The material's thermal behavior is also defined via the subroutine UMATHT. As the material properties change due to the powder bed fusion process, the model takes it into account. In this way, the calculation of a temperature-dependent behavior is undertaken for the packed powder bed, within its effective thermal conductivity and specific heat. Furthermore, the model accounts for the latent heat due to phase change of the metal powder. Finally, a time- and temperature-dependent formulation for the material's density is also computed, which is then integrated along with the other thermal properties in the heat equation. FE simulations have been applied to the case of titanium powder and show predictions in good agreement with experimental results. The effects of process parameters on the temperature and on the density distribution are also presented.