Modification of the LSMPS method for the conservation of the thermal energy in laser irradiation processes.

Summary: In this work, new least‐square moving particle semi‐implicit (LSMPS) formulations for the modeling of the heat conduction in laser irradiation processes for both thick blocks and thin plates are developed. These new LSMPS formulations guarantee the conservation of the total thermal energy during the heat exchange between particles. The conservation of the thermal energy in the LSMPS method was implemented together with multiresolution techniques for the discretization of the domain with particles of different sizes so that a better characterization of the thermal gradients in the vicinity of the laser beam can be obtained. The simulation of laser irradiation processes for thin plates is still very challenging for particle methods with spherical particles and this is essentially because it is difficult to accommodate a minimum number of particles along the thickness direction without increasing considerably the resolution or the number of particles in the entire plate. In order to overcome this difficulty, a new multiresolution method based on particles with ellipsoidal shapes was also developed for a more efficient modeling of the laser irradiation in thin plates. By conducting the heat conduction simulations, in which the standard LSMPS method can provide accurate temperature distribution and by comparing the results with an analytical solution, it was confirmed that the proposed method is as accurate as the standard LSMPS method. Moreover, the heat conduction with an external heat source, in which the total thermal energy is not conserved by using the standard LSMPS method, was successfully simulated by using the proposed method. The simulations of laser irradiations were also conducted, and the validity of the proposed method has been confirmed by comparing numerical results with experimental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]