B. Helten
University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center, Maine, United States
Keywords: advanced manufacturing, digital manufacturing, simulation, rapid prototyping, digital thread
The recent rapid advances in manufacturing hardware and capabilities to create complex geometries and graded materials have outpaced the digital solutions used to design and engineer these processes and resulting products. Digital manufacturing solutions are needed to enable agile manufacturing approaches using these technologies and to accelerate the design cycle by considering both the product and process concurrently. The Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine is developing a digital thread and simulation-driven digital manufacturing framework to enable agile design with these processes. This framework flexibly combines commercial solvers with custom solutions to automate and parametrize the simulation workflow and establish a traceable digital thread. This is then leveraged to train surrogate models, such as Kriging or neural network models, for design-critical parameters of both the manufacturing process and the resulting product performance. These surrogates can then be used to accelerate the design process and enhance agility in the response to changes in mission constraints and objectives.