As time passes, the requirements for tecnology become higher and higher. Tecnhology needs to become faster, stronger, and more durable. To be able to keep up with these eternaly renovating standarts, new processes need to be created.
When speaking of manufacturing processes, Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) by Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is one of the most promissing, as it is able to produce extremely complex geometries, in short periods of time with low material waste, up until now no other process is able to replicate these caracteristics. Besides the existance of all these positive aspects, this process still hasn't been dominated, and there are still quite alot of issues, such as porosity, residual stress, cracking, distortion, delamination, and surface finish. These aspects make it difficult to predict the final results of the process. Since currently the underlying physical phenomena are not fully understood, the modelling and simulation of the SLM process is important to the advancement of the SLM industry, for such reasons in this project we propose to develop a new program based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), to help predict the influence of the previously named factors, for a better finishing result. |
Project Goals The main goal for this project is the development of advanced computacional methods for the simulation of the powder-based addictive manufacturing process, that is able to predict how the process parameters and material affect the part distotion, residual stress, surface quality, microstructure and mechanical properties.
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Tasks
The finite element simulation of the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process is a rather complex process, as aspect such as powder properties and packing density, heat absotion distribution, geometry of the melt pool and thermal conductivity of the powder bed are extremely hard to predict just by themselves, but will also vary throughout the opperation of the SLM process, and will have a great influence on the results of the simulations precision.
The projects first task will mainly focus on these important features of the simulation:
Task 1: Development of computational methods at powder scale.
The complexity of the simulation process does not end there, as the temperature variation implemented by the laser, and the microstructure of the treated material will influence the behaviour of the projected component.
Task 2: Multi-scale modelling of the SLM additive manufacturing process.
Now that most of the internal factors are adjurned, it's necessary to optimize the process's parameters, our last task will focus on the optimization of these:
Task 3: Process paremeters optimization using numerical simulation.
The projects first task will mainly focus on these important features of the simulation:
Task 1: Development of computational methods at powder scale.
The complexity of the simulation process does not end there, as the temperature variation implemented by the laser, and the microstructure of the treated material will influence the behaviour of the projected component.
Task 2: Multi-scale modelling of the SLM additive manufacturing process.
Now that most of the internal factors are adjurned, it's necessary to optimize the process's parameters, our last task will focus on the optimization of these:
Task 3: Process paremeters optimization using numerical simulation.