Surrogate Modeling of Melt Pool Thermal Field using Deep Learning

Powder-based additive manufacturing has transformed the manufacturing industry over the last decade. In Laser Powder Bed Fusion, a specific part is built in an iterative manner in which two-dimensional cross-sections are formed on top of each other by melting and fusing the proper areas of the powder bed. In this process, the behavior of the melt pool and its thermal field has a very important role in predicting the quality of the manufactured part and its possible defects. However, the simulation of such a complex phenomenon is usually very time-consuming and requires huge computational resources. Flow-3D is one of the software packages capable of executing such simulations using iterative numerical solvers. In this work, we create three datasets of single-trail processes using Flow-3D and use them to train a convolutional neural network capable of predicting the behavior of the three-dimensional thermal field of the melt pool solely by taking three parameters as input: laser power, laser velocity, and time step. The CNN achieves a relative Root Mean Squared Error of 2% to 3% for the temperature field and an average Intersection over Union score of 80% to 90% in predicting the melt pool area. Moreover, since time is included as one of the inputs of the model, the thermal field can be instantly obtained for any arbitrary time step without the need to iterate and compute all the steps