Parameters Selection for the Production of Fully Dense Metals Processed by Selective Laser Melting

Selective laser melting (SLM) presents significant assets for both industrial and academic fields. However, the process parameters selection is yet challenging. It presents tens of parameters to be carefully selected, including laser power and speed, bed thickness, hatching space, and other parameters, for the manufacturing of parts with high density. This paper provides a deeper understanding of the processing parameters’ effect on the evolution of the product’s density. A series of numerical simulations of porosity is achieved on Ansys Additive© software and it shows the evolution of the relative density at different laser powers and scan speeds. Numerical results show that low laser power and accelerated scan lead to the generation of a small melt pool, and consequently low density. In the opposite case, at high power and slow scan, the created melt pool is wide enough to avoid porosity and generate fully dense products. The product density is proportionally related to the melt pool size. Hence, it could be estimated through the correlation with the melt pool width, which enables the perfect selection of the hatching space for the selected set of parameters.