On the modeling of additive manufacturing: Printing process and printed structures

Abstract

With decades of development, Additive Manufacturing (AM) grows significantly and has been used in a wide range of applications. Although AM was introduced for production of prototypes, it is now being utilized for fabrication of functional end-use products. Therefore, structural integrity and mechanical strength of additively manufactured parts have become of significant importance. The rise of potentials of AM process motivate research and industry to use modeling techniques to support the process and product development by reducing costly and time consuming experiments. In the current study, we have demonstrated two simulation case studies: (a) modeling of AM process, and (b) modeling of additively manufactured parts. Simufact additive manufacturing software is used which provides simulation solution for all metal manufacturing process. Simufact is used to examine the development of residual stresses during the thermal treatment in selective laser melting process. We also used commercial Finite Element (FE) software Abaqus to simulate structural integrity of additively manufactured adhesive joints. We demonstrated how FE modeling can be employed to reveal the impact of printing parameters of the adherends of the joints on to their mechanical performances and their cohesive fracture. The outcome of this study can be utilized for implementation of simulation and computational modeling into the future designs of additively manufactured components.