Alternative Approach to Modeling of Nucleation and Remelting in Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing

In powder bed fusion (PBF) of metals, energy of a laser or electron beam is utilized to form near‐net‐shaped parts from a powder bed. A very promising application of PBF lies in the direct control of the resulting microstructure by adjusting process parameters. Especially the intentional tilting of grains in one certain direction offers a complete new field of activity for additively produced parts specially designed for a given load case. Nucleation is essential for utilization of this effect. Herein, an alternative approach for modeling nucleation in PBF of metals is introduced. The model is not intended to cover every physical effect of this extreme complex phenomenon. Based on observations reported from different researchers in the field of PBF, a heuristic approach is applied to consider new grains within a cellular automata (CA)‐based crystal growth model for PBF. Utilizing the implicit capability of the CA to model competitive growth of grains, this approach does not require any additional computational capacities. The numerical calculations are carried out using a message–passing interface (MPI) parallelization on a high‐performance computing (HPC) cluster located at the Regional Research Center Erlangen. The numerical results are validated by means of experiments and electron backscatter diffractometric measurements.