Selective laser sintering (SLS) is one of the most widely researched additive manufacturing techniques for metallic materials, especially due to its flexibility and rapidness in manufacturing novel and complex geometries. Despite all the advantages, the widespread use of SLS is still hindered due to some limitations such as anisotropy and heterogeneity in its resultant microstructure and properties. Modeling and simulation of SLS aims at complementing the understanding of the process via the current time and cost expensive experimental efforts. The underlying physics for SLS is highly complicated and interactive in nature, which involves physical effects such as heat and mass transfer, grain coalescence and coarsening, and the partial melting of powder particles, on multiple length and time scales. This makes the modeling and simulation of SLS a great challenge.

In this work, we present multilayer phase-field simulation of the SLS process and the calculation of effective mechanical properties, the evolution of plastic strain, and the residual stresses in the microstructure. The proposed non-isothermal phase-field model is used to compute the microstructure evolution and its respective transient thermal history. These were then imported to the finite element based thermo-mechanical simulation to calculate the mechanical responses of the material during the SLS process. Batched multilayer simulations based on a layer-by-layer powder deposition scheme with varying process parameters, namely beam power and scan speed were conducted. The data obtained from these simulations was analyzed to establish the dependence of the process parameters on the morphology, the plastic behavior, and the residual stresses in the material.