A Modified Shrinkage Method for Fast Prediction of Residual Distortion and Stresses in Additive Manufacturing of Metal Parts

This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

The heating and cooling processes that occur during the Additive Manufacturing (AM) by Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) induce distortions in the part, which need to be accounted for in order to fabricate the desired final part within tolerances. The Finite Element Method (FEM) allows the determination of the distortion and the residual stress fields due to this AM process. A typical thermo-mechanical simulation of a part would require several hours or days from the computational point of view; however, the proposed method reduce these times to few hours or even minutes thanks to the combination of the shrinkage method and the condensation layer technique. This simplified approach allows a fast method to determine the distortions and the residual stresses and enables a later prewarping study of the initial geometry to obtain the final desired part.