Fast Computation of Thermal Field of Direct Metal Deposition: A Preliminary Study Based on Quiet Element Method

Direct metal deposition (DMD) is a major additive manufacturing (AM) process, which employs high energy beams as the heat source to melt and deposit metals in layerwise fashion so that complex structural components can be directly obtained. Similar to other metal AM processes, DMD is a complicated thermo-mechanical process, characterized by fast scan rates, large thermal gradients, rapid material phase transformations, and cyclic non-uniform temperature changes. Accurate and efficient computation of the thermal field during the DMD process is essential for understanding the fundamental microstructure evolution and developing the optimization strategy. In this paper, we aim to develop an open-source and fast computation tool for analyzing the heat transfer during the DMD process, which is based on the finite volume formulation and the quiet element method and allows development of customized functionalities at the source level. A computing tool is developed in MATLAB for fast prediction of the temperature field during metal additive manufacturing, and compared against the regular finite element analysis using a commercial software. The preliminary results show that for a system of 14400 cells, deposition of a single path takes 174 s using the commercial software, and 15.8s to 81s depending on the setting of convergence criterion using the in-house code. This represents a time reduction ranged from 90.9% to 53.4%, and the overall error is around 12.1%.