Hi,
During modeling of thermo-mechanical simulation of powder bed fusion process, output of thermal analysis is used as thermal load applied to structural analysis, since this is a sequential approach. So structural analysis depends on thermal analysis results. 

1. If I choose time-increments to be very large (lets say 450 sec) and I know that laser exposure on one surface is couple of sec max, does it mean that during analysis only output frequency of results is effected by this choice or will it mean that simulation will skip some time (e.g. laser exposure time) and so there will be no output for that missed time?
2. If some crucial event (eg. laser exposure) for large time-increments is missed, will it mean that results using large time-increments are wrong?
   
3. In other words, how small time increments of first step (in this case for thermal analysis) must be that dependent step is not affected by this choice? On other extreme, this time-increment cannot be too small otherwise part-scale simulation is not possible. so what should be the trade-off? Any advice. 

Thanks. 

Abaqus ​​​​​​​