Purpose
This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in powder bed fusion (PBF) techniques for additive manufacturing of multiple materials. It reviews the emerging technologies in PBF multimaterial printing and summarizes the latest simulation approaches for modeling them. The topic of “multimaterial PBF techniques” is still very new, undeveloped, and of interest to academia and industry on many levels.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a review paper. The study approach was to carefully search for and investigate notable works and peer-reviewed publications concerning multimaterial three-dimensional printing using PBF techniques. The current methodologies, as well as their advantages and disadvantages, are cross-compared through a systematic review.
Findings
The results show that the development of multimaterial PBF techniques is still in its infancy as many fundamental “research” questions have yet to be addressed before production. Experimentation has many limitations and is costly; therefore, modeling and simulation can be very helpful and is, of course, possible; however, it is heavily dependent on the material data and computational power, so it needs further development in future studies.
Originality/value
This work investigates the multimaterial PBF techniques and discusses the novel printing methods with practical examples. Our literature survey revealed that the number of accounts on the predictive modeling of stresses and optimizing laser scan strategies in multimaterial PBF is low with a (very) limited range of applications. To facilitate future developments in this direction, the key information of the simulation efforts and the state-of-the-art computational models of multimaterial PBF are provided.
This paper presents an efficient mesoscale simulation of a Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The efficiency lies in reducing the computational effort via spatial adaptivity, for which a dynamic particle refinement pattern with an optimized neighbor-search algorithm is used. The melt pool dynamics is modeled by resolving the thermal, mechanical, and material fields in a single laser track application. After validating the solver by two benchmark tests where analytical and experimental data are available, we simulate a single-track LPBF process by adopting SPH in multi resolutions. The LPBF simulation results show that the proposed adaptive refinement with and without an optimized neighbor-search approach saves almost 50% and 35% of the SPH calculation time, respectively. This achievement enables several opportunities for parametric studies and running high-resolution models with less computational effort.
Numerical simulation of metal cutting with rigorous experimental validation is a profitable approach that facilitates process optimization and better productivity. In this work, we apply the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Finite Element Method (FEM) to simulate the chip formation process within a thermo-mechanically coupled framework. A series of cutting experiments on two widely-used workpiece materials, i.e., AISI 1045 steel and Ti6Al4V titanium alloy, is conducted for validation purposes. Furthermore, we present a novel technique to measure the rake face temperature without manipulating the chip flow within the experimental framework, which offers a new quality of the experimental validation of thermal loads in orthogonal metal cutting. All material parameters and friction coefficients are identified in-situ, proposing new values for temperature-dependent and velocity-dependent friction coefficients of AISI 1045 and Ti6Al4V under the cutting conditions. Simulation results show that the choice of friction coefficient has a higher impact on SPH forces than FEM. Average errors of force prediction for SPH and FEM were in the range of 33% and 23%, respectively. Except for the rake face temperature of Ti6Al4V, both SPH and FEM provide accurate predictions of thermal loads with 5–20% error.
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