Multipart Build Effects on Temperature and Residual Stress by Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion Additive Manufacturing

Laser beam powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) is a leading technique among metal additive manufacturing (AM), and it has a wide range of applications in aerospace and medical devices. Most of the existing PBF-LB process modeling is mainly based on the fabrication of a single part on a large build plate, which is not reflective of the practical multipart PBF-LB manufacturing. The effects of batch size on the thermal and mechanical behavior of additively manufactured parts have not been investigated. In this work, the multipart PBF-LB thermomechanical modeling framework was proposed for the first time. The effects of sample numbers (1, 2, and 4) on temperature and residual stress (RS) of part-scale components were computationally investigated. It is found that RS within the parts decreased with increasing number of components per build. Parts located at the central areas of the build plate had larger RS than at the border. These findings can be beneficial for informing AM designers and operators of the optimum printing setup to minimize RS of metal parts in PBF-LB.