Towards enhancing computational efficiency of numerical heat transfer model for laser powder bed fusion

Numerical heat transfer models are increasingly used to compute the temperature field, melt pool dimensions and thermal cycles for laser powder bed fusion but huge computational demand of these models is a perpetual challenge. We present a recently introduced novel dynamic meshing strategy to preserve a fine meshed region always beneath the laser beam and a gradually coarsened region away from the beam thereby notably reducing the overall model size and computational demand. Probed over a wide range of conditions, we show a reduction of the computational time and volume by nearly 6 to 10 times vis-à-vis little loss of accuracy in the computed results with the dynamic meshing strategy compared to traditional approaches with static uniform meshing.