Development of a Simulation-Based Process Chain – Strategy for Different Levels of Detail for the Preprocessing Definitions

Abstract

Additive manufacturing processes fulfill the ac-tual market demands with regard to a high individuality and complexity of products. Hence, these processes are used nowadays in different branches (e. g. aerospace, automotive, medical industry). Further-more, a high pro-cess stability and reproducibility is requested by the user for an eco-nomic application of this technology. Up to now, these targets are reached by numer-ous test rigs on the manufacturing system which causes high resource consumption. For increasing the efficiency of metal-based additive man-ufacturing (AM), the em-ployees of the iwb application center Augsburg in corporation with the CADFEM GmbH and four further partners develops a simulation-based process chain (founded by the Bavarian Research Founda-tion). Before the production process is started, an analysis of the structural part behavior as well as a process optimi-zation should be per-formed using the finite element analysis (FEA). Due to the complexity of the thermal-ly activated process, it is necessary to select the appropriate FE-modeling strategy for enhancing the target figures calculation efficiency and accuracy. Hence, in this work a strategy will be presented, which can map different levels of detail for the preprocess-ing definitions. These local and global descriptions can be realized by using suitable con-tact definitions (contact elements) to link different ele-ment meshes. Additionally, the user can select different layers of the part geometry, which should be analyzed in detail within the simulation. Also layer-specific distortions and residual stresses can be calculated while saving calcu-lation time. Furthermore, with this approach the process history and therefore the whole part geometry can be considered in the structural cal-culations. A validation of the transient temperature field and the mechanical part properties is presented by the comparison with measured values.