PoWER

This project is being mentored by Prof. Arvind Kumar from Mechanical Engineering Department. The use of secondary melting processing, including electron beam melting (EBM), is attracting increasing interest to high-purity ingot casting of reactive metals and to the additive manufacturing industry for producing medical grade stainless steels,titanium, titanium alloys and cobalt-chrome alloys. In the additive fabrication process a scanning electron beam is used to melt pre-alloyed metal powder in a layered fashion and build a three-dimensional construct.The precise representation of the heat flux input from the electron beam is crucial for full-scale modeling of the electron beam melting and re-solidification of the ingot and powder materials. For this an appropriate input of the heat source model is needed. The objective of this project is to analyze the input heat flux through various models e.g., uniform heat flux in the simplest case, Gaussian flux profile orDoughnut profile with its dependence on several input parameters such as, beam power, beam spot diameter, penetration depth, absorptivity of the metal-to-be melted. Net heat flux will be then estimated as the difference between beam heating and losses due to radiation and evaporation. Due to temperature dependent material properties and a moving heat source, an analytical representation of the thermal model is considerably demanding.This will be handy in studying the mathematical–physical model of melt pool instabilities as a function of various input parameters.