Particle Finite Element Method for simulations of Selective Laser Melting with vaporization

The purpose of this work is the simulation of selective laser melting processes.
Such processes involve multiple physical phenomena that need to be taken into
account altogether such as thermo-mechanical coupling, solid-liquid-solid
phase change, surface tension and vaporization. The variety of different physical
phenomena, as well as the presence of a highly deformed fluid free surface,
implies multiple constraints on the required numerical procedure. Notably, the
need to compute the free surface position and curvature leads to complex
interface tracking algorithms in the widely-used Eulerian-based models.
The Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM), a Lagrangian method with fast
triangulation and boundary identification algorithms, has been chosen to
overcome some of the difficulties mentioned previously. A new version of the
2D/3D PFEM code presented in (S. Février, “Development of a 3D
Compressible Flow Solver for PFEM Fluid Simulations”, ULiège Master
Thesis, 2020) has been developed to take into account the aforementioned
physical phenomena, notably Marangoni forces and recoil pressure, and the
interactions with a laser.
Alongside the presentation of the mathematical formulation and the description
of its numerical implementation, some simulations involving a moving laser
melting a block of material are presented and discussed