Evaluation of the Thermal Processes and Simulation Methods for Additive Manufacturing Based on the Geometry Voxel Representation

Abstract

Currently, the technological and hardware base additive production technologies are actively developing. The emergence of new developments in the field of materials science and their possibilities for the creation of products using layer-by-layer method promotes the development of innovative solutions that increase the efficiency of complex technical parts and improves their quality. This paper describes simulation methods based on the Model Voxel Representation part discretization allowing evaluating thermal processes during 3D printing process. The simulation model was extended taking into consideration the following criteria: heat conduction coefficient as a constant; temperature in the center of the elementary volume equals to the temperature at the volume border; temperature of the powder surrounding the item taken as a constant. It was determined that the convergence is affected by numerous factors: temperature in the machine chamber, material properties, heat exchange and the processes running into the chamber of the certain machines.

A systematic review of voxelization method in additive manufacturing

“…QC5 Are the analytical results provided? 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0 2.5 [28] 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 2.5 [29] 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 0 2.5 [30] 0.5 0.5 0.5 0 0.5 2 [31] 0.5 0.5 1 0 0 2 [32] 1 0.5 0 0 0.5 2 [33] 0.5 0 0.5 0 0.5 1.5 clear and relevant documents, some quality criteria have been defined, based on the approach reported by [8], and applied to all the resulting 25 documents. These quality criteria (QC), which are answer to questions related to the quality and relevance of the papers, have been collected in Table 2.…”

“…The main contribution is the developing of a mathematical model without the need to assemble the overall stiffness matrix and, as a consequence, speeding up the simulations. A similar theme is developed in [29], where another model to simulate the thermal processes for AM is proposed, by implementing an heat-conduction equations for isotropic mediums.…”

“…In particular, a recurring theme is the development of a framework for manufacturing quoting, that is basically an estimation of time, cost, or material consumption required to produce a component whose CAD model is available [11,20,21] while optimizing the part orientation and estimating its printing feasibility. On the other hand, [10,29] focus the attention on the thermal simulation during the manufacturing process in order to assess its influence on the final product performances. This is done using a transient finite element analysis without requiring to assembly the overall stiffness matrix and it is solved with Newton-Raphson method.…”

“…OpenCL is a standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of multi-processor boards found in personal computers, servers, mobile devices and embedded platforms (source: https://www.khronos.org/opencl/). In combination with C programming language, this programming standard is used as software platform for the 3D virtual manufacturing simulator described in [28,29]. Moreover, [30] uses OpenCL for procedural foam implementation as a kernel to process each foam slice.…”

“…Reference [9] uses voxels as computational unit for topology optimization evaluation, in a similar manner respect to what done in [10,29], where the discretized elements are used as a support for the thermal process simulation. There are some papers associated with the same voxel use: [11,15,28] who use these elementary cubes as a computational unit to discrete the geometry under analysis in order to detect critical areas (i.e.…”