Macroscopic simulation and experimental measurement of melt pool characteristics in selective electron beam melting of Ti-6Al-4V

Selective electron beam melting of Ti-6Al-4V is a promising additive manufacturing process to produce complex parts layer-by-layer additively. The quality and dimensional accuracy of the produced parts depend on various process parameters and their interactions. In the present contribution, the lifetime, width and depth of the pools of molten powder material are analyzed for different beam powers, scan speeds and line energies in experiments and simulations. In the experiments, thin-walled structures are built with an ARCAM AB A2 selective electron beam melting machine and for the simulations a thermal finite element simulation tool is used, which is developed by the authors to simulate the temperature distribution in the selective electron beam melting process. The experimental and numerical results are compared and a good agreement is observed. The lifetime of the melt pool increases linearly with the line energy, whereby the melt pool dimensions show a nonlinear relation with the line energy.