Investigation of the Effects of Roller Spreading Parameters on Powder Bed Quality in Selective Laser Sintering

Powder spreading is one of crucial steps in selective laser sintering (SLS), which controls the quality of the powder bed and affects the quality of the printed parts. It is not advisable to use empirical methods or trial-and-error methods that consume lots of manpower and material resources to match the powder property parameters and powder laying process parameters. In this paper, powder spreading in realistic SLS settings was simulated using a discrete element method (DEM) to investigate the effects of the powder’s physical properties and operating conditions on the bed quality, characterized by the density characteristics, density uniformity, and flatness of the powder layer. A regression model of the powdering quality was established based on the response surface methodology (RSM). The relationship between the proposed powdering quality index and the research variables was well expressed. An improved multi-objective optimization algorithm of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) was used to optimize the powder laying quality of nylon powder in the SLS process. We provided different optimization schemes according to the different process requirements. The reliability of the multi-objective optimization results for powdering quality was verified via experiments.