3D Thermal Simulation of a Laser Drilling Process with Meshfree Methods

Abstract

Numerical simulation of laser drilling is rapidly gaining interest in academia and industry since this process remains one of the most important and widely-used technologies in modern manufacturing. Meshfree methods such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) have proven to be successful as a numerical tool for the computation of the heat transfer and material removal associated with a laser drilling problem. Nonetheless, the vast majority of recent developments incorporate an inconsistent SPH kernel into their thermal simulations. In this paper, several enhanced schemes are implemented to address this problem by solving the heat transfer more accurately. These meshfree schemes can provide a second-order accurate discretization of the Laplace operator and abolish the inconsistency issue of the standard SPH kernels. An efficient approach is additionally suggested to handle the associated boundary conditions, which relies on the idea of the color function and particle label. The implementation is initially validated by a 3D benchmark study and then applied for the first time to a laser drilling problem.