Process Modeling for Powder-Based Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing Technology

Powder-based electron beam additive manufacturing (EBAM) is a relatively new additive manufacturing (AM) technology, by which physical solid parts are made, layer-by-layer, directly from electronic data, generally files from computer-aided design (CAD) software. EBAM utilizes a high-energy electron beam, as a moving heat source, to melt and fuse metal powders and produce parts in a layer-wise fashion. AM offers many design and manufacturing advantages such as short lead time, design freedom in geometry, and tooling free. Furthermore, EBAM is capable of making full-density metallic parts, which drastically broadens AM applications in a wide variety of industries.

Despite the potential benefits of EBAM technologies and increasing studies/reports of this process, there has been little literature in process modeling/simulations of EBAM. EBAM is a rather complicated process; however, fundamental understanding of process physics is a key to improve the process performance and part quality consistency. In this research, finite element simulations, using commercial software, are applied to model the temperature field and history during the EBAM process, and to investigate the thermomechanical aspects of an EBAM built part for residual stress evaluations. Moreover, process temperatures are acquired using a near-infrared thermal imager for thermal model validations. The research methodology and results obtained so far will be presented in details.