Design and simulation of a metal additive manufacturing system by means of diode area melting technique

Abstract

Metal additive manufacturing is a field of advanced manufacturing which consists in the building of a component layer by layer based on a 3D digital model. A vast variety of technologies had been researched in different types of additive manufacturing leading to very well standardized and established processes for the industry. Even though metal additive manufacturing presents lots of benefits, there still exists problems to be solved like the residual stresses generated due to the thermal cycle the piece is exposed to during the printing, the low energy absorption efficiency for specific materials, or the long duration of the process compared to a traditional manufacturing process. The work presented in this thesis developed a finite element model for the purpose of investigating the development of the thermal distributions along x-direction and y-direction of stainless steel 316L powder by applying the Diode Area Melting (DAM) technique to a Selective Laser Melting (SLM) additive manufacturing process. ANSYS Mechanical APDL software was utilized in performing coupled thermal-structural field analysis. This work is based on the design and simulation on a metal additive manufacturing system by powder bed fusion based on the technique of Diode Area Melting, which uses an array of multiple low power diode lasers that works at shorter wavelengths as is it accustomed. This approach has the intention of tackling the problems of time production, energy efficiency and residual stresses in the part. A thermal simulation experiment is done in order to determine the best configuration parameters for the powder fusion and the stresses generated by this new printing technique.