beamWeldFoam: Numerical simulation of high energy density fusion and vapourisation-inducing processes

Abstract

High energy density advanced manufacturing processes, such as power beam welding and additive manufacturing, are notoriously difficult to simulate. Such processes initiate fusion, and vapourisation, state transitions in their respective (normally metallic) substrates generating complex metallic flows over incredibly short time scales. To mathematically model such processes, equations describing the conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, and an equation that describes the evolution of the metallic substrate interface must be considered. In this work, we present beamWeldFoam, an OpenFOAM solver capable of simulating these high energy density advanced manufacturing processes. In beamWeldFoam, the metallic substrate, and shielding gas phase, are treated as incompressible. The volumetric dilation due to the vapourisation state transition is neglected, instead, a phenomenological recoil pressure term is used to capture the contribution to the momentum and energy fields due to vaporisation events. beamWeldFoam is released under the GNU general public license, and its source code is available on Github.

Keywords

• Advanced manufacturing
• Volume-of-fluid
• Heat transfer
• OpenFOAM
• State transition