Modelling heat transfer in powder bed additive manufacturing

One of the most important ingredients in a numerical model of Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a heat transfer model. On its own this is challenging enough as conductive, convective and radiative heat transfer mechanisms are all important, coupled with liquid/solid phase changes. For metals and alloys the process is also inherently multiscale – a perennial problem in materials science. Furthermore, heat transfer is only the first step to predict different phenomena of interest including metallurgical microstructure, defects and thermal stresses to name a few. This paper briefly touches on several of these areas, all of which merit concerted effort by the modelling community