Thermal fluid modelling of selective laser melting

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) has been increasingly popular in producing metal parts in the manufacturing industry. Its flexibility in printing complex shapes has given it an advantage over conventional manufacturing methods. There are many experimental studies conducted to obtain the optimized parameters for different materials. By varying parameters such as laser power and scanning speed, it will affect the energy density on the powder bed, hence affecting the quality of the part. Since there are many parameters in the SLM process, it will take numerous experiments to determine the optimized parameters. Numerical modelling can be introduced to study the melting of the powders during SLM. The Marangoni force and recoil pressure play important roles in replicating the laser melting process. This paper will discuss on the effects on these two factors and the importance of their inclusion in the model.EDB (Economic Devt. Board, S’pore)Published versio