This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly growing industry with the ability to produce a wide variety of unique parts. While additive manufacturing presents a large opportunity for manufacturers, many encounter problems with failed builds without necessarily knowing the root cause of the issue. Simulation of the additive process can aid in the prevention of build failures and help identify methods to fix existing issues. This reduces the number of iterations typically required in design for additive manufacturing and gives manufacturers more confidence in how reliably a part can be built. Additive manufacturing simulation capabilities have been developed to complete a thermal-structural analysis of an AM build using a layer by layer approach. A Coupled thermal and structural model is well suited to accurately predict thermal and structural conditions throughout the build process and post-processing steps. Analysis of deformation, stresses, strains, and other outcomes that occur during and after the build can help highlight issues in key or problems areas of the part. Drawing attention to these regions gives designers and manufacturers the ability to identify problems in the manufacturing process before resources are spent on machine time or material costs. Additive manufacturing models can enable the analysis of important results throughout the additive buildup, heat treatment, and support removal. Placed in a design workflow with other design tools, additive manufacturing simulation can help designers ensure success during the manufacturing process in addition to the intended use for a particular design. A complete workflow allows for part design optimization for the use case, and can identify whether the design can be successfully created with additive manufacturing. Simulation results are presented for multiple parts and compared against experimental measurements with good agreement. Completing analysis on an AM process simulation, rather than a physically built part, can not only save valuable resources, but also allows designers to progress through design iterations more quickly.