Numerical modeling of powder spreading in additive manufacturing processes: effects of process parameters and particle size distribution

Overview & Synopsis

Powder bed properties are of main interests in additive manufacturing processes. Particularly, it is paramount to ensure a correct density of the powder bed as this will have an impact on the final part properties. In this work, we propose to model the deposition of powder by the discrete element method through an elastic contact law (using the EDEM software from Altair with GPU acceleration). Different particle size distributions are used with different recoating strategies so as to estimate the effect of the mean particle size, recoater speed and nominal layer thickness on the powder bed density and segregation. Those two quantities evolve similarly with the increase of layer thickness, whatever the particle size distribution. Only the segregation is observed to have a larger impact for wider particle size distribution.