Phase-field simulation of dendritic solidification using a full threaded tree with adaptive meshing

Simulation of the microstructure evolution during solidifi cation is greatly benefi cial to the control of solidifi cation microstructures. A phase-fi eld method based on the full threaded tree(FTT) for the simulation of casting solidifi cation microstructure was proposed in this paper, and the structure of the full threaded tree and the mesh refi nement method was discussed. During dendritic growth in solidifi cation, the mesh for simulation is adaptively refi ned at the liquid-solid interface, and coarsened in other areas. The numerical results of a threedimension dendrite growth indicate that the phase-fi eld method based on FTT is suitable for microstructure simulation. Most importantly, the FTT method can increase the spatial and temporal resolutions beyond the limits imposed by the available hardware compared with the conventional uniform mesh. At the simulation time of 0.03 s in this study, the computer memory used for computation is no more than 10 MB with the FTT method, while it is about 50 MB with the uniform mesh method. In addition, the proposed FTT method is more effi cient in computation time when compared with the uniform mesh method. It would take about 20 h for the uniform mesh method, while only 2 h for the FTT method for computation when the solidifi cation time is 0.17 s in this study.

Temperature field simulations during selective laser melting process based on fully threaded tree

Selective laser melting(SLM) is a promising technique for additive manufacturing. During SLM of metallic powder, the temperature field and thermal history are important to understand physical phenomena involved. The purpose of this study is to simulate the temperature field during the SLM process of a hollow cylinder shape part based on a fully threaded tree(FTT) technique, and to analyze the temperature variation with time in different regions of the part. A revised model for temperature field simulation in the SLM process was employed, which includes the transition of powder-to-dense sub-model and a moving volumetric Gaussian distribution heat source sub-model. The FTT technique is then adopted as an adaptive mesh strategy in the simulation. The simulation result shows that during the SLM process of cylinder part, the temperature of inner powder bed is obviously higher than external one. The temperature at the internal of the molten pool is also higher than external, which may lead to differences in microstructures and other properties between the two regions.