Matematik för elektronstrålesmältning: 3D-skrivning i metall

Research Project, 2016 – 2020

3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), is an emerging technology that has gained a lot of attention recently. In the area of AM, electron beam melting (EBM), developed by the Swedish company Arcam AB in Mölndal, has taken a unique position by offering metallic parts of high quality materials for serial production of medical implants and aerospace parts. In the EBM process metallic powder is melted layer by layer by a high energy, focused electron beam. The layers are melted onto each other and form a 3D part directly from CAD data. The electron beam melts the powder by scanning over the layer at a high a speed. In order to improve the melting process, and at the same time make 3D printing by EBM more transparent for validation, new mathematical models and simulation algorithms for the EBM process will be developed. This will make it possible to control and validate the EBM process from computed temperature distributions. It will also be possible to couple the computed temperature distribution to methods for calculating the microstructure within the part. This would be a great improvement by combining designed materials with 3D printing. The developed computational methodology, based on finite elements and model order reduction, will be of scientific interest in computational mathematics.