On efficiency and effectiveness of finite volume method for thermal analysis of selective laser melting

Purpose Selective laser melting (SLM) is a major additive manufacturing (AM) process in which laser beams are used as the heat source to melt and deposit metals in a layerwise fashion to enable the construction of components of arbitrary complexity. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for accurate and fast prediction of the temperature distribution during the SLM process. Design/methodology/approach A fast computation tool is proposed for thermal analysis of the SLM process. It is based on the finite volume method (FVM) and the quiet element method to allow the development of customized functionalities at the source level. The results obtained from the proposed FVM approach are compared against those obtained from the finite element method (FEM) using a well-established commercial software, in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Findings The results show that for simulating the SLM deposition of a cubic block with 81,000, 189,000 and 297,000 cells, the computation takes about 767, 3,041 and 7,054 min, respectively, with the FEM approach; while 174, 679 and 1,630 min with the FVM code. This represents a speedup of around 4.4x. Meanwhile, the average temperature difference between the two is below 6%, indicating good agreement between them. Originality/value The thermal field for the multi-track and multi-layer SLM process is for the first time computed by the FVM approach. This pioneering work on comparing FVM and FEM for SLM applications implies that a fast and simple computing tool for thermal analysis of the SLM process is within the reach, and it delivers comparable accuracy with significantly higher computational efficiency. The research results lay the foundation for a potentially cost-effective tool for investigating the fundamental microstructure evolution, and also optimizing the process parameters in the SLM process.