ICME-W Non-spherical particles in powder bed fusion additive manufacturing

In laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF) additive manufacturing, the powder particles commonly produced by gas atomization have some non-sphericities. It is known that non-spherical particles affect the particle packing process, however, there is a limited understanding of their effect on molten pool dynamics resulted from laser powder interaction. In their recent paper published in Computational Materials Science, Gao et al. studied the non-sphericities in L-PBF using a computational framework consisting of a particle packing model based on discrete element method (DEM) and a meso-scale molten pool model based on heat transfer and free surface flow. The results suggest some amount of non-sphericities could be tolerated without markedly affecting the melt track dimensions. Moreover, the types of non-sphericities (e.g., joined vs. satellite) could play an important role on the build quality.