A chimera method for thermal part-scale metal additive manufacturing simulation

This paper presents a Chimera approach for the thermal problems in welding and metallic Additive Manufacturing (AM). In particular, a moving mesh is attached to the moving heat source while a fixed background mesh covers the rest of the computational domain. The thermal field of the moving mesh is solved in the heat source reference frame. The chosen framework to couple the solutions on both meshes is a non-overlapping Domain Decomposition (DD) with Neumann–Dirichlet transmission conditions.

Increased steadiness and accuracy within the vicinity of the Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) are the main advantages of this approach. The steadiness gain allows for the use of larger time steps, which is vital in AM applications and, in particular, Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), where the disparity of time scales represents a major hurdle. Moreover, enhanced accuracy can be observed in the resulting morphology of the melt pool. It will be shown that the method addresses classical shortcomings pointed out by Goldak without requiring the use of an asymmetrical heat source profile.