On the role of the powder stream on the heat and fluid flow conditions during Directed Energy Deposition of maraging steel - Multiphysics modelling and experimental validation

The Directed Energy Deposition (DED) process of metals, has a broad range of applications in several industrial sectors. Surface modification, component repairing, production of functionally graded materials and more importantly, manufacturing of complex geometries are major DED’s applications. In this work, a multi-physics numerical model of the DED process of maraging steel is developed to study the influence of the powder stream specifications on the melt pool’s thermal and fluid dynamics conditions.

The model is developed based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM) framework using the commercial software package Flow-3D. Different physical phenomena e.g. solidification, evaporation, the Marangoni effect and the recoil pressure are included in the model. As a new feature, the powder particles’ dynamics are modeled using a Lagrangian framework and their impact on the melt pool conditions is taken into account as well.

In-situ and ex-situ experiments are carried out using a thermal camera and optical microscopy. The predicted track morphology is in good agreement with the experimental measurements. Besides, the predicted melt pool evolution follows the same trend as observed with the online thermal camera. Furthermore, a parametric study is carried out to investigate the effect of the powder particles incoming velocity on the track morphology.

It is shown that the height-to-width ratio of tracks increases while using higher powder velocities. Moreover, it is shown that by tripling the powder particles velocity, the height-to-width ratio increases by 104% and the wettability of the track decreases by 24%.