Consolidation behavior of metal powders in laser additive manufacturing

Laser additive manufacturing is one of the advance manufacturing processes, which builds an intricate shape of components from powders. In this process, a high-power laser beam scans the powder bed in a user-defined path to fuse the powder material in a layer by layer fashion. The quality of the build parts in this process depends on the consolidation kinetics which is directly influenced by the process parameters. In the present investigation, a mesoscale base phase-field model was developed to understand the consolidation kinetics of AlSi10Mg alloy powders in this process with varying laser power i.e., 70 W, 100 W, and 130 W by keeping a constant scan speed of 100 mm/s. From the simulation results, it was observed that the consolidation of powder particles occurs due to the diffusion mechanism. The diffusion rate and neck width increase with an increase in laser energy and finally remain constant which confirms the completion of the fusion of powder particles in this process.