Capturing Local Temperature Evolution During Additive Manufacturing Through Fourier Neural Operators

High-fidelity, data-driven models that can quickly simulate thermal behavior during additive manufacturing (AM) are crucial for improving the performance of AM technologies in multiple areas, such as part design, process planning, monitoring, and control. However, complexities of part geometries make it challenging for current models to maintain high accuracy across a wide range of geometries. In addition, many models report a low mean-square error (MSE) across the entire domain of a part. However, in each time-step, most areas of the domain do not experience significant changes in temperature, except for the regions near recent depositions. Therefore, the MSE-based fidelity measurement of the models may be overestimated. This article presents a data-driven model that uses the Fourier neural operator to capture the local temperature evolution during the AM process. Besides MSE, the model is also evaluated using the R2 metric, which places great weight on the regions where the temperature changes significantly than MSE. The model was trained and tested on numerical simulations based on the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for the direct energy deposition AM process. The results shows that the model maintains 0.983-0.999 R2 over geometries not included in the training data, which is higher than convolutional neural networks and graph convolutional neural networks we implemented, the two widely used architectures in data-driven predictive modeling.