Element activation strategy for Additive Manufacturing, based on the element deletion algorithm

With the rise of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies in the industry, it is becoming more and more crucial to have a good understanding of those processes. This leads to a high need for the implementation of a model that can accurately simulate such a process. The difficulties of simulating AM can come from multiple sources. Firstly, from the nature of the process. Indeed, it requires a large deformation thermo-mechanical simulation. Secondly, the modeling of the material law is complex. Lastly, the geometry of the process imposes a very fine discretization (layers can be as small as a few μm). This creates models that are very computationally costly. Moreover, the process requires altering the geometry of the model during simulations to model the addition of matter, which is a computational challenge by itself.
This poster presents the implementation of a three-dimensional thermal Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of AM in the fully implicit in-house Finite Element code “Metafor”. The main focus of the work is on mesh management techniques. The method to activate elements during a simulation is adapted from the element deletion algorithm (erosion method) implemented in Metafor in the scope of crack propagation. The final model is compared against literature results with a good agreement.