TY - JOUR A1 - Osmanlic, Fuad A1 - Wudy, Katrin A1 - Laumer, Tobias A1 - Schmidt, Michael A1 - Drummer, Dietmar A1 - Körner, Carolin T1 - Modeling of Laser Beam Absorption in a Polymer Powder Bed JF - Polymers N2 - In order to understand the absorption characteristic, a ray trace model is developed by taking into account the reflection, absorption and refraction. The ray paths are resolved on a sub-powder grid. For validation, the simulation results are compared to analytic solutions of the irradiation of the laser beam onto a plain surface. In addition, the absorptance, reflectance and transmittance of PA12 powder layers measured by an integration sphere setup are compared with the numerical results of our model. It is shown that the effective penetration depth can be lower than the penetration depth in bulk material for polymer powders and, therefore, can increase the energy density at the powder bed surface. The implications for modeling of the selective laser sintering (SLS) process and the processability of fine powder distributions and high powder bed densities are discussed. KW - additive manufacturing KW - laser absorption KW - PA12 KW - polyamide 12 KW - powder bed Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/polym10070784 VL - 10 IS - 7 SP - 1 EP - 11 PB - MDPI ER -