Thermal Modeling of Polyamide 12 Powder in the Selective Laser Sintering Process Using the Discrete Element Method

Selective laser sintering (SLS) is one of the key additive manufacturing technologies that can build any complex three-dimensional structure without the use of any special tools. Thermal modeling of this process is required to anticipate the quality of the manufactured parts by assessing the microstructure, residual stresses, and structural deformations of the finished product. This paper proposes a framework for the thermal simulation of the SLS process based on the discrete element method (DEM) and numerically generated in Python. This framework simulates a polyamide 12 (PA12) particle domain to describe the temperature evolution in this domain using simple interaction laws between the DEM particles and considering the exchange of these particles with the boundary planes. The results obtained and the comparison with the literature show that the DEM frame accurately captures the temperature distribution in the domain scanned by the laser. The effect of laser power and projection time on the temperature of PA12 particles is investigated and validated with experimental settings to show the reliability of DEM in simulating powder-based additive manufacturing processes.