Numerical computation of component shape distortion manufactured by selective laser melting

The main aim of this paper is to effectively replicate the process heat effects during Selective Laser Melting (SLM) using a commercial FE package in terms of modeling effort and computation time, in order to achieve reliable residual stress distributions and distortions compared to experimental measurements. Since each build-up layer consists of hundreds of scan vectors, it is impracticable to model and execute a transient thermo-mechanical simulation without appropriate simplifications. By managing to provide reliable numerical results of the final component shape the volume-by-volume (VBV) method will allow performing a parameter sensitivity analysis on the final shape distortion. With the VBV method three layers of materials are being brought into melt simultaneously. The parameters investigated are the overall heat input and the stiffness of the component; both being directly related to the number of layers being deposited.