Effect of accounting for powder in thermomechanical simulations for laser powder bed fusion

This study evaluates the effect of accounting for powder in mechanical predictions for laser powder-bed-fusion by comparing: an inherent-strain based mechanical-only analysis, and thermomechanical simulations where the thermal analysis is conducted with and without powder elements. Results on Inconel 718 parts show that the thermal predictions with powder elements have less than 7 % error while the thermal predictions without powder elements could not capture the trend in measurements. In predicting the peak distortion, the thermomechanical model with powder elements has 21 % lower prediction error than the model without powder elements and 30 % lower prediction error than the mechanical-only analysis.