H. Hosseinzadeh
Rowan University,
United States
Keywords: metal 3D printer, Additive manutacturing, computational software
Summary:
AM computational tech is a computational package to simulate additive manufacturing. This multiscale multiphysics computational code was developed in Visual basics 2015 to simulate thermomechanical behavior and microstructural evolution of metal (and polymers in the next version) 3D printing by Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) technique. This technique involves blowing multiple metal powders into a laser beam so that the laser melts the powder and forms a small pool at the point where the laser touches the part that is being built. This code has a graphical user interface (GUI) with 3D graphics to visualize printed samples and its post-processed results. It has three coupled main computational algorithms for, i. Thermal analysis, ii. Mechanical analysis and iii. Several Monte Carlo algorithms to simulate metal’s microstructural evolution. The user has control over printing speed, amount of feeding powder materials, materials (at this time, it is limited to steel, polymer, and more materials will be added in the next version), printer bed temperature, cooling condition between each pass, etc. This computational package is solving energy and momentum conservation equations with finite difference numerical methods, and it is also coupling thermal history for each mesh with Monte Carlo algorithm to simulate grain structure of solidified and heat-affected zones. This software could be used to find optimized conditions before printing, which is reducing the expenses of experimental trials and errors.