A Comparative Study of Layer Heating and Continuous Heating Methods on Prediction Accuracy of Residual Stresses in Selective Laser Melted Tube Samples

Thermal distortion and residual stresses are two important factors that affect the quality and reliability of steel parts manufactured by laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes. A cost-effective model for evaluation of those heat effects is needed to refine the manufacturing process and provides insights into the product design and heat treatment. In this study, the layer heating method and sophisticated track-layer scanning method were applied to simulate the thermo-mechanical response of IN625 tube parts built by LPBF. Based on the similarity of temperature field in each layer deposit, a swept mesh was constructed to perform the thermal analysis for top layer, with the rest of layers referring to the temperature by node number offsetting. A novel explicit finite element analysis code accelerated by graphics processing unit was used for the massive-element numerical analysis. The computational accuracy and efficiency of the layer heating and track-layer scanning methods were compared in detail. It is shown that layer heating method can efficiently capture the pattern of stress distribution with reasonable accuracy in stress magnitude. The grouped track-layer scanning method can predict the residual stress and strain more accurately at a higher cost (5 ~ 10x). The elastic strain distribution was compared with the measurement by X-ray diffraction, confirming the accuracy of residual stress prediction.

Automated summary

Thermal distortion and residual stresses are important factors affecting the quality and reliability of steel parts manufactured by LPBF. A cost-effective model is needed to evaluate these heat effects to optimize the manufacturing process. The study compared the computational accuracy and efficiency of layer heating and track-layer scanning methods for simulating the thermo-mechanical response of IN625 tube parts built by LPBF. The layer heating method efficiently captured stress distribution patterns with reasonable accuracy, while the grouped track-layer scanning method predicted residual stresses and strains more accurately at a higher cost.