Approaches for structural simulation of additively manufactured metal parts

The market for additive manufacturing of metal parts is rapidly growing. Powder based fusion technologies such as Laser Beam Melting (LBM) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM) are leading this market, whereby LBM is dominating in machine sales and diversity in industrial applications. Nevertheless, additive manufacturing technologies are still lacking of process reliability. Therefore, simulation tools for a better understanding of interactions of different process parameters are needed. Today, often experimental trial and error approaches are used for process and part quality improvement regarding residual stresses and resulting macroscopic part deformations. Singular research projects have covered setting up process or structural simulation models for powder based fusion technologies, but commonly struggle between calculable part size / complexity and detailed modeling of individual process parameters. In this article, requirements for LBM structure simulations are addressed and practical solutions for both, detailed structural simulations of individual layers and computing time optimized simulations of whole parts in few hours computing time are presented. For the presented work, the commercial welding simulation software Simufact.welding was used. The simulations results are compared with experimental work and an outlook on future developments for structural simulations of additively manufactured metal parts will be given.