High-Fidelity Numerical Modelling Of Cold Spatter Formation During Laser Powder Bed Fusion Of 316-L Stainless Steel High-Fidelity Numerical Modelling Of Cold Spatter Formation During Laser Powder Bed Fusion Of 316-L Stainless Steel

Spatter and denudation are two very well-known phenomena occurring mainly during the laser powder bed fusion process and are defined as ejection and displacement of powder particles, respectively. The main driver of this phenomenon is the formation of a vapor plume jet that is caused by the vaporization of the melt pool which is subjected to the laser beam. In this work, a 3-dimensional transient turbulent computational fluid dynamics model coupled with a discrete element model is developed in the finite volume-based commercial software package Flow-3D AM to simulate the spatter phenomenon. The numerical results show that a localized low-pressure zone forms at the bottom side of the plume jet and this leads to a pseudo-Bernoulli effect that drags nearby powder particles into the area of influence of the vapor plume jet. As a result, the vapor plume acts like a momentum sink and therefore all nearby particles point are dragged towards this region. Furthermore, it is noted that due to the jet’s attenuation, powder particles start diverging from the central core region of the vapor plume as they move vertically upwards. It is moreover observed that only particles which are in the very central core region of the plume jet get sufficiently accelerated to depart the computational domain, while the rest of the dragged particles, especially those which undergo an early divergence from the jet axis, get stalled pretty fast as they come in contact with the resting fluid. In the last part of the work, two simulations with two different scanning speeds are carried out, where it is clearly observed that the angle between the departing powder particles and the vertical axis of the plume jet increases with increasing scanning speed.