Selective laser melting (SLM) is an additive manufacturing (AM) technique that has the potential to produce almost any three-dimensional (3D) metallic part, even those with complicated shapes. Throughout the SLM process, the heat transfer characteristics of the metal powder plays a significant role in maintaining the product quality during 3D printing. Thus, it is crucial for 3D-printing manufacturers to determine the thermal behavior over the SLM process. However, it is a significant challenge to accurately determine the large temperature gradient and the melt pool size using only experiments. Therefore, the use of both experimental investigations and numerical analysis can assist in characterizing the temperature evaluation and the melt pool size in a more effective manner. In this study, 3D finite element analysis applying a moving volumetric Gaussian laser heat source was used to analyze the temperature profile on the powder bed and the resultant melt pool size throughout the SLM process. In the experiments, a TELOPS FAST-IR (M350) thermal imager was applied to determine the temperature profile of the melting pool and powder bed along the scanning direction during the SLM fabrication using Ti6Al4V powder. The numerically calculated results were compared with the experimentally determined temperature distribution. The comparison showed that the calculated peak temperature for single- and multi-track by the developed thermal model was in good agreement with the experiment results. Secondly, the developed model was verified by comparing the melting pool size for various laser powers and scanning speeds with the experimentally measured melting pool size from the published literature. The developed model could predict the melt pool width (with 2–5% error) and melt pool depth (with 5–6% error).
Additive manufacturing is an advanced manufacturing technology that allows building any complex 3D geometry of product by adding layer by layer of material. One of the most important effectiveness of additive manufacturing is able to manufacture lattice structure inside product space in order to reduce the usage of material and the weight of the product but still ensure its mechanical properties. The lattice structure is a network of bars linked each other in a space of product and it can be quickly manufactured due to the development of additive manufacturing technologies. However, the design of a model of the lattice structure in the computeraided design environment has many difficulties. The current modeling technologies do not support product designer to automatically create a model of the lattice structure with the different type of configurations. Therefore, the paper will present new approaches to automatically generate a 3D model of the lattice structure in the design space of the product. These approaches allow creating different configurations of the periodic or non-periodic lattice structure.
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