Numerical modelling of heat transfer and experimental validation in powder-bed fusion with the virtual domain approximation
Journal article, 2020
Among metal additive manufacturing technologies, powder-bed fusion features very thin layers and rapid solidification rates, leading to long build jobs and a highly localized process. Many efforts are being devoted to accelerate simulation times for practical industrial applications. The new approach suggested here, the virtual domain approximation, is a physics-based rationale for spatial reduction of the domain in the thermal finite-element analysis at the part scale. Computational experiments address, among others, validation against a large physical experiment of 17.5 [cm3] of deposited volume in 647 layers. For fast and automatic parameter estimation at such level of complexity, a high-performance computing framework is employed. It couples FEMPAR-AM, a specialized parallel finite-element software, with Dakota, for the parametric exploration. Compared to previous state-of-the-art, this formulation provides higher accuracy at the same computational cost. This sets the path to a fully virtualized model, considering an upwards-moving domain covering the last printed layers.
Selective laser melting (SLM)
Finite elements (FE)
Additive manufacturing (AM)
Powder-bed fusion (PBF)
Thermal analysis
High performance computing (HPC)
Author
Eric Neiva
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Michele Chiumenti
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Miguel Cervera
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Emilio Salsi
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
Gabriele Piscopo
Polytechnic University of Turin
Santiago Badia
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Monash University
Alberto F. Martín
Polytechnic University of Catalonia
The International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)
Zhuoer Chen
Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Materials and manufacture
Monash University
Caroline Lee
Monash University
Christopher Davies
Monash University
Published in
Finite Elements in Analysis and Design
0168-874X (ISSN)
Vol. 168 art. no 103343Categorizing
Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)
Computational Mathematics
Computer Science
Computer Systems
Identifiers
DOI
10.1016/j.finel.2019.103343