Simulation of the viscoplastic extrusion process using the radial point interpolation meshless method

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is an emergent technology, which witnessed a large growth demanded by the consumer market. Despite this growth, the technology needs scientific regulation and guidelines to be reliable and consistent to the point that is feasible to be used as a source of manufactured end-products. One of the processes that has seen the most significant development is the fused deposition modeling, more commonly known as 3D printing. The motivation to better understand this process makes the study of extrusion of materials important. In this work, the radial point interpolation method, a meshless method, is applied to the study of extrusion of viscoplastic materials, using the formulation originally intended for the finite element method, the flow formulation. This formulation is based on the reasoning that solid materials under those conditions behave like non-Newtonian fluids. The time stepped analysis follows the Lagrangian approach taking advantage of the easy remeshing inherent to meshless methods. To validate the newly developed numerical tool, tests are conducted with numerical examples obtained from the literature for the extrusion of aluminum, which is a more common problem. Thus, after the performed validation, the algorithm can easily be adapted to simulate the extrusion of polymers in fused deposition modeling processes.