Prediction of material thermal properties and beam-particle interaction in meso-scale during electron beam additive manufacturing

An integrated computational modeling framework is under development for the electron beam based additive manufacturing (EBAM) process to establish the fundamental correlation among material properties, process parameters and thermal and mechanical performances of the final manufactured components. In this paper, the material thermal property (i.e. thermal conductivity) and beam-powder interaction at meso-scale are numerically investigated by finite element method and Monte Carlo simulation respectively. The influences of powder size distribution, pact density and contact area between the powders are considered. The resulting effective thermal property of powder layer and beam energy distribution and absorption coefficient on powder bed are obtained. These results from the meso-scale analysis provide the necessary input conditions to the macroscopic heat transfer and mechanical model for predicting the residual stress distribution and shape distortion of the manufactured component.