Minimizing Defects in Additive Manufacturing and Laser Welding Through Energy Coupling Experiments and Dynamic Modelling

Additive manufacturing is a revolutionary technology that produces complex components as a single piece, replacing traditional assemblies and reducing waste. Laser powder bed fusion, a type of additive manufacturing, allows for limitless design freedom by building intricate parts layer-by-layer through melting and fusing metal powder. However, build quality remains inconsistent, with deformations like pores and spattering occurring. To improve modelling of the behaviour of melted metal, thus minimizing defects, an experiment which determined the metal’s absorptance of laser energy through integrating sphere radiometry was conducted. The integrating sphere, which spatially integrated a fraction of measured light to calculate full radiance, had to sit above the build plate and not interfere with powder spreading. I designed two parts which attached the integrating sphere to the motorized powder spreading blade. Utilizing small ridges in the enclosure as weight-bearing tracks, the blade’s torque was reduced while allowing precise movement of the sphere. Through implementing these parts, the experiment was conducted, whose results will aid in our understanding of laser-metal interactions. Defects like spattering also occur during laser welding, due to the vaporization of unstable liquid metal. To combat this, novel beam shapes have been seen to increase the stability of the keyhole. To model this effect, I created a phenomenological, dynamic model of the keyhole depth during a copper weld. Two differential equations were created to model the keyhole depth’s rate of change using a dual mode and single mode laser, depending on absorptance and incident laser intensity. The dynamic depth of the keyhole for both modes was numerical solved in Python and iterated using existing copper weld data. Through better quantitative understanding of energy coupling and numerical modelling of the resulting dynamics, defects in laser welding and additive manufacturing can be minimized.