No abstract

No abstract

Selective laser sintering (SLS) is one of the key additive manufacturing technologies that can build any complex three-dimensional structure without the use of any special tools. Thermal modeling of this process is required to anticipate the quality of the manufactured parts by assessing the microstructure, residual stresses, and structural deformations of the finished product. This paper proposes a framework for the thermal simulation of the SLS process based on the discrete element method (DEM) and numerically generated in Python. This framework simulates a polyamide 12 (PA12) particle domain to describe the temperature evolution in this domain using simple interaction laws between the DEM particles and considering the exchange of these particles with the boundary planes. The results obtained and the comparison with the literature show that the DEM frame accurately captures the temperature distribution in the domain scanned by the laser. The effect of laser power and projection time on the temperature of PA12 particles is investigated and validated with experimental settings to show the reliability of DEM in simulating powder-based additive manufacturing processes.

One of the most promising additive manufacturing techniques is selective laser sintering (SLS) of thermoplastic materials. However, the materials successfully applicable to laser sintering (LS) are very limited today. In this study the exceptional position of polyamide 12 powders is underlined. Several numerical and experimental studies have been carried out to make comparisons between the use of powdered materials for polyamide 12 and other types of polymers during the SLS process. The complexity of this process and the interaction between the different phenomena involved has not been fully understood. In this work we highlight the different models of the selective laser sintering of polyamide 12 as well as their different results in order to better understand the functioning of this process.