Practical DOE-Based Approach for Predicting Impact of Stress and Deformation in SLM Overhanging Features During Product Design Institutional Repository Document

As additive manufacturing (AM) processes become more refined and widely used, it is essential for engineers and production managers to fully understand the processes in order to effectively use them within production systems. Unfortunately, most of the existing solutions for analyzing AM processes are too complex and specialized for use in a practice-based setting. The present study seeks to address aspects of this problem by developing a simple first-principles finite element model for the selective laser melting (SLM) AM process and a rigorous experiment to analyze the process in terms of its input factors. This model and experiment can provide much useful and easily understood data to the designers and production managers including SLM in their process flow. The experiment was verified and run fully in order to demonstrate it, producing information about the influence of five major input factors and their many interactions during the processing of a part with an overhanging feature