Speaker
Description
Silicon carbide (SiC) is a widely used industrial ceramic because of its excellent properties which makes it useful for a wide range of applications. The regular industrial process, to manufacture these wide and complex parts, has been successfully developed since the ’90s. However, for some specific applications, the component design could be improved by additive manufacturing. As one of additive manufacturing methods, selective laser sintering/melting (SLS/SLM) has been expected to fabricate complicated shape components in recent years.
The original scientific approach of this work resides in the combination of experimental work and numerical analysis to find the best conditions to reach direct SLS of SiC. The numerical study was accomplished by developing a CFD model. The CFD model simulates accurately realistic conditions of the SLS process. A user-defined code, that describes the process parameters such as laser power, scanning speed, scanning strategies, and hatching distance has been developed and compiled to ANSYS FLUENT 2020 R1. Also, the model was validated with the available published data from the literature. The model was used to deeply analyse and support the results obtained through the experimental runs.
Different values of laser power, scanning speeds, powder compaction, hatching distance and layer thickness in combination with different scanning strategies were studied. The results showed that the direct SLS of SiC is possible with the optimization of the process parameters. Layer thickness and hatching distance are the most important parameters that needed to be optimized. Also, the laser power and scanning speed needed to be adjusted so that the scanning temperature was between the sintering and the decomposition limits. The good agreement between experimental and simulation results proved the power and ability of the developed CFD model to be a useful tool to analyse and optimize future experimental data.
| Speaker Country | France |
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