Computational Investigation of Transport Processes during High Energy Materials Processing Application using a Hybrid Lattice Boltzmann Model

A three dimensional numerical simulation is performed in order to understand the transport of mass, momentum and heat during high energy materials processing applications using a hybrid lattice Boltzmann (LB) model. The underlying hydrodynamics is addressed through an evolution equation of a single-particle density distribution function following the conventional LB approach, whereas, the macroscopic temperature and compositional fields are obtained by solving auxiliary scalar transport equations. The solid-liquid phase changing aspects are incorporated into the hydrodynamic LB model by inserting appropriate source terms in the evolution equation through the most formal technique following the extended Boltzmann equations along with an adapted enthalpy updating scheme in association with the classical enthalpy-porosity technique. A high power laser surface alloying process is simulated using the developed model and excellent agreement with the available experimental results is observed.