The Effect of Alloys, Powder, and Overhanging Geometries in Laser Powder Bed Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) shows great promise for the manufacturing of next-generation engineering structures by enabling the production of engineered cellular structures, overhangs, and reducing waste. Melt-pool geometry prediction and control is critical for widespread implementation of laser powder bed processes due to speed and accuracy requirements. The process mapping approach used in previous work for different alloys and additive manufacturing processes is applied to the selective laser powder bed process for IN625 and 17-4 stainless steel alloys. The ability to predict the resulting steady state melt-pool geometry in terms of process parameters, specifically power and velocity, is explored in detail numerically and experimentally verified. A finite element model was created that simulates powder at the macro scale. This model correlates well with current experiments in showing that small amounts of powder relative to melt-pool depth have negligible effects on resulting geometry. Results indicate that the effect of powder may be negligible when comparing steady state widths of the no powder and one layer of powder cases. The work in this thesis investigates the effect of powder on the resulting steady-state melt-pool geometries for IN625 and 17-4 alloys. This analysis has been extended to the production of overhanging and cellular structures. The successful analysis will allow for better predictions and possible correction for cellular structure production issues as well as overhanging features.