[Abstract] Predicting the temperature field during the direct energy deposition (DED) process is vital for the microstructure control and property tuning of fabricated metals. The widely used data-driven machine learning method for accurate temperature prediction, however, is impractical and computation-intensive due to its sole reliance on large datasets; also being a black-box model in nature, it lacks interpretability. We propose a physics informed neural network (PINN) model, which adopts a novel physics-data hybrid method by embedding the heat transfer law into the loss function of the neural network, to model the temperature field in both single-layer and multi-layer DED. The results show that the PINN-based models with additional extrapolation ability can accurately predict temperatures with a mean relative error of 4.83%, and achieve identical prediction accuracy with only 20% of the labeled data required for training the data-driven deep neural network. The proposed model is more explainable in terms of the physics of the DED process and is also applicable for the DED of different metals.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-08542-w