Efficient Meshfree Method for Heat Conduction in Selective Laser Sintering Process

Additive manufacturing is an advanced model-free manufacturing technology by means of the layered deposition of materials and in recent years it attracts intensive attentions. Based on the element-free Galerkin method (meshfree method), a numerical technique to efficiently simulate the selective laser sintering additive manufacturing process, in which powder-bed is the main technical characteristic, is presented. Corresponding to the process of laying powder layer by layer, the computational nodes and background integration cells are introduced layer by layer. "Mesh" coarsening is adaptively employed in regions far from current manufacturing layer to reduce the scale of the computation, by making full use of the merit of the element-free method in which the construction of approximation functions only depends on nodes instead of elements of the mesh. In order to further improving the computational efficiency, the stabilized conforming nodal integration technology is introduced and the number of integration points is substantially reduced. Numerical results show that the developed method is able to effectively simulate the heat conduction in selective laser sintering additive manufacturing process and to reproduce the evolution of the thermal field. In comparison with the simulation method using general finite element analysis software and the standard meshfree method using Gauss integration, the proposed method substantially reduces the computational time and significantly improves the computational efficiency of the numerical analysis of the heat conduction in selective laser sintering process. © 2019 Journal of Mechanical Engineering.