An immersed boundary approach for residual stress evaluation in SLM processes

The article “An immersed boundary approach for residual stress evaluation in selective laser melting processes” has been recently published on the Additive Manufacturing journal.

In the this contribution, the Finite Cell method (FCM), an immersed boundary method, is employed to predict residual stresses using a high-fidelity thermo-mechanical model resolving the melt-pool length scale. The thermal model is first validated with respect to experimental measurements from the literature, while the mechanical results are compared to boundary-conforming mesh analysis for the same geometrical accuracy. Finally, the numerical method is applied to study the influence on residual stresses of two different laser scan strategies on a 10-layer SLM structure.

The proposed immersed boundary approach can lead to a remarkable improvement in terms of computational time and memory usage when the mesh generation step is the main burden of a thermo-mechanical SLM process simulation.

This work was conducted together with Dr.-Ing. Stefan Kollmannsberger and Prof. Ernst Rank of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and supervised by Prof. Alessandro Reali and Prof. Ferdinando Auricchio from the University of Pavia.

Video: Von Mises stress evolution during SLM process.

June 18, 2021

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