Experimental investigating and numerical simulations of the thermal behavior and process optimization for selective laser sintering of PA6

In this paper, the thermal behavior and process optimization for polyamide 6 during the selective laser sintering process were systematically investigated via numerical simulations and experimental testing. The effects of laser power and scanning speed were studied, and the simulation results showed that the increasing laser power and decreasing scanning speed led to the increase of the maximum temperature and the three-dimensional size of molten pool. Then, the single-layer experiments under different process parameters were carried out to verify the accuracy of the model. In addition, the energy density was applied to evaluate the combined effect of laser power and scanning speed on the thermal behavior. A process map for parameter optimization was obtained based on the predicted results, and the optimized parameters were in the region that the powder can be remelt resulting in an enough depth of molten pool, while the maximum temperature was below the decomposition temperature. Meanwhile, the specimen selected in the remelting region showed the highest tensile strength.