Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) shows great potential for producing light-weight structures, reducing development cost and lead time in critical industies such as aerospace and medical device. However, a major barrier that remains is rapid qualification of additively manufactured components. Sentient Science Corporation (Sentient) has been enhancing its DigitalClone® software to include an ICME (integrated computational materials engineering) modeling framework for part qualification in metal additive manufacturing (AM). This physics-based multiscale model can be used to qualify material and process parameters with minimal calibration. Specifically, the DigitalClone model can take key AM process parameters (e.g. laser power, scan speed, hatch strategy, layer thickness) as inputs, and simulate part-level distortion and residual stress.It can also simulate the microstructure (e.g. grain structure, porosity) of as-built parts, and fatigue performance when the part is used in the field. This paper will present a series of case studies to demonstrate Sentient’s simulation suite. Sentient expects this to be one of the most comprehensive software solutions for part qualification in metal AM.

Author: Jingfu Liu, Behrooz Jalalahmadi, Ziye Liu, Melissa McReynolds, Jason Rios

Publish Date: June 22,2019