The Research Of Plasma Powder Deposition Manufacturing With FLUENT

Plasma Powder Deposition Manufacturing(PPDM)as a kind of Rapid Prototyping technology has a lot of advantages, For example, it can process a wide rang of materials, it has a high speed of processing and it can manufacture big workpieces So it attracts the industry's attention. The flow state of molten pool in the manufacturing process can directly affect the performance of the deposition layer. So analysis the flow field and the temperature field of the molten pool with numerical simulation software is very useful.Based on computational fluid dynamics and the basic principles of heat transfer, the Plasma Powder Deposition Manufacturing process is simulated. The research is focus on establishing a suitable three-dimensional mathematical model and putting the energy source and the mass source into FLUENT. To achieve the purpose the User Defined Function(UDF) in FLUENT had to be used .The result of the simulation was analyzed and was compared to the previous research. It's found that the simulation agreed with previous research and experimental results. The shape of the head and the sides of the deposition layer is totally as the same as the experimental result. The profile of the temperature field changed from a circle to a oval and profile of the molten pool changed as the same way. The depositing processing of the second deposition layer was simulated in FLUENT with two different schemes which are the same-direction deposition and the reverse-direction deposition. The results of the two schemes were the same and it means that the direction of the deposition has no influence on the manufacturing process. The swing welding of which the swing motion is a uniform speed motion is also simulated. The boundary condition and the physical parameters of the materials were the same as the other simulation. The results show that the swing motion lead to the concentration of the energy and the deposition powder near the centerline. For that the molten pool was longer than the normal deposition process and there even a second molten pool was formed.