A consistent diffuse-interface finite element approach to rapid melt--vapor dynamics with application to metal additive manufacturing

This repository contains information and code to reproduce the results presented in the article:

@article{schreterfleischhacker2025meltvapordynamics,
title = {A consistent diffuse-interface finite element approach to rapid melt–vapor dynamics with application to metal additive manufacturing},
journal = {Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering},
volume = {442},
pages = {117985},
year = {2025},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2025.117985},
author = {Magdalena Schreter-Fleischhacker and Nils Much and Peter Munch and Martin Kronbichler and Wolfgang A. Wall and Christoph Meier}
}

If you find these results useful, please cite the article mentioned above. If you use the implementations provided here, please also cite this repository as:

@misc{schreterfleischhacker2025meltvapordynamicsrepo,
  title={Reproducibility repository for "{A} consistent diffuse-interface finite element approach to rapid melt--vapor dynamics with application to metal additive manufacturing"},
  author={Schreter-Fleischhacker, Magdalena and Much, Nils and Munch, Peter and Kronbichler, Martin},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/MeltPoolDG/paper-2025-anisothermal-melt-vapor-am}},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15061694}
}

Disclaimer

Everything is provided as is and without warranty. Use at your own risk!

Abstract

Metal additive manufacturing via laser-based powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/M) faces performance-critical challenges due to complex melt pool and vapor dynamics, often oversimplified by computational models that neglect crucial aspects, such as vapor jet formation. To address this limitation, we propose a consistent computational multi-physics mesoscale model to study melt pool dynamics, laser-induced evaporation, and vapor flow. In addition to the evaporation-induced pressure jump, we also resolve the evaporation-induced volume expansion and the resulting velocity jump at the liquid--vapor interface. We use an anisothermal incompressible Navier--Stokes solver extended by a conservative diffuse level-set framework and integrate it into a matrix-free adaptive finite element framework. To ensure accurate physical solutions despite extreme density, pressure and velocity gradients across the diffuse liquid--vapor interface, we employ consistent interface source term formulations developed in our previous work. These formulations consider projection operations to extend solution variables from the sharp liquid--vapor interface into the computational domain. Benchmark examples, including film boiling, confirm the accuracy and versatility of the model. As a key result, we demonstrate the model's ability to capture the strong coupling between melt and vapor flow dynamics in PBF-LB/M based on simulations of stationary laser illumination on a metal plate. Additionally, we show the derivation of the well-known Anisimov model and extend it to a new hybrid model. This hybrid model, together with consistent interface source term formulations, especially for the level-set transport velocity, enables PBF-LB/M simulations that combine accurate physical results with the robustness of an incompressible, diffuse-interface computational modeling framework.

Reproducing the results

Requirements

• linux-based system
• boost installed
• mpi installed
• openblas or blas installed
• python3 installed

Installation

To download the code using Git, use:

git clone [email protected]:MeltPoolDG/paper-2025-anisothermal-melt-vapor-am.git

If you do not have Git installed, you can obtain a .zip file and unpack it:

wget https://github.com/MeltPoolDG/paper-2025-anisothermal-melt-vapor-am/archive/main.zip
unzip paper-2025-anisothermal-melt-vapor-am.zip

To install the code execute:

cd paper-2025-anisothermal-melt-vapor-am/MeltPoolDG
bash scripts/config/install.sh

Then, follow the installation instructions. You can accept the default settings by pressing Enter.

Running the code

The input files and postprocessing scripts for the numerical studies, presented in the article, are located in the benchmarks directory. Please follow the instructions provided in the README file within the benchmarks folder for running the simulations.

Authors of this repository

• Magdalena Schreter-Fleischhacker (Corresponding Author), @mschreter, Technical University of Munich
• Nils Much, @nmuch, Technical University of Munich
• Peter Munch, @peterrum, Technical University of Berlin
• Martin Kronbichler, @kronbichler, Ruhr University Bochum