Temperature Distribution Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion using Transferable and Scalable Graph Neural Networks
This work addresses the computational inefficiency of thermal simulations in additive manufacturing, offering a scalable and efficient predictive tool for industry applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GNN methods.
This study tackled the problem of predicting temperature distributions in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) additive manufacturing by developing Graph Neural Network (GNN) surrogates, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 3.77% with a baseline model and a 46.4% improvement in MAPE for multi-laser models, while reducing computational time from hours to near-instant predictions.
This study presents novel predictive models using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for simulating thermal dynamics in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) processes. By developing and validating Single-Laser GNN (SL-GNN) and Multi-Laser GNN (ML-GNN) surrogates, the research introduces a scalable data-driven approach that learns fundamental physics from small-scale Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations and applies them to larger domains. Achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 3.77% with the baseline SL-GNN model, GNNs effectively learn from high-resolution simulations and generalize well across larger geometries. The proposed models capture the complexity of the heat transfer process in L-PBF while significantly reducing computational costs. For example, a thermomechanical simulation for a 2 mm x 2 mm domain typically requires about 4 hours, whereas the SL-GNN model can predict thermal distributions almost instantly. Calibrating models to larger domains enhances predictive performance, with significant drops in MAPE for 3 mm x 3 mm and 4 mm x 4 mm domains, highlighting the scalability and efficiency of this approach. Additionally, models show a decreasing trend in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) when tuned to larger domains, suggesting potential for becoming geometry-agnostic. The interaction of multiple lasers complicates heat transfer, necessitating larger model architectures and advanced feature engineering. Using hyperparameters from Gaussian process-based Bayesian optimization, the best ML-GNN model demonstrates a 46.4% improvement in MAPE over the baseline ML-GNN model. In summary, this approach enables more efficient and flexible predictive modeling in L-PBF additive manufacturing.