Ultra-fast laser-patterning computation for advanced manufacturing of powdered materials exploiting knowledge-based heat-kernels

The processing of powdered materials by laser processing has become quite widespread. One approach is to deposit a powder bed of material and to “flash” a pattern onto the bed in order to sufficiently heat up the material to sinter and/or fully melt the desired targeted pattern. This avoids rastering a single beam back and forth to produce the pattern. In order to adequately control the thermal fields that are induced by the laser pattern,simulation tools are needed to quickly ascertain the parameter setting needed, such as • powder porosity, • powder conductivity, • beam spatial distribution and • beam temporal duration. The focus of this work is to develop a rapid computational tool that can be used in conjunction with manufacturing systems. The approach is to develop precomputed solutions for point-source “beamlets” and then to create patterns by arranging the point-sources in the proper configuration. The entire thermal field is then created by superposing the solutions. A series of three-dimensional problems are solved to illustrate the approach, which is geared to rapidly solving the response to complex patterns.