Numerical Simulation of Balling Phenomenon in Metallic Laser Melting Process

As well known, the selective laser Sintering (SLS) is one of the most modern and innovative additive manufacturing technologies with general advantages and wide applications, as a non-contact process, which is flexible, and easily controlled. The choice of process parameters is quite important for laser melting in metallic powder bed. When these parameters are not correctly chosen, particles are either not sintering at all or joining into rather large droplets. This process is named as balling phenomenon, which is extremely unfavorable. In this paper, a 3D numerical model based on discrete element method is proposed in order to study the effect of parameters on the generation of balling droplets in laser melting process. A complex model is developed which couples all phenomena of full SLS process and results of simulations are compared with experimental works of other researchers taken from the literature. Copyright © 2016 by ASME.