Thermomechanical Analysis of Powder Bed–Type Additive Manufacturing Processes Using the Pattern-Based Method
Special-purpose techniques and user subroutines are available to define the relevant
process parameters for material deposition and heat sources. You do not need to define a
trajectory of a heat source or a recoater movement to perform a sequentially coupled
thermal-stress analysis analysis using the pattern-based method.
These internal
built-in user subroutines are accessed by starting names for table collections with
"ABQ_TMP" as described below.
In a powder bed–type additive manufacturing (AM) process,
such as selective laser sintering (SLS) and stereolithography
(SLA), a single layer of raw material is deposited by a
recoater or a roller blade. Then, a high-powered laser scans a single cross-section of the
part following a raster scan pattern over the layer of raw material to fuse it with the
previously laid layer underneath. The layer-upon-layer raw material deposition is simulated by
progressive element activation in a structural or a thermal analysis, and the laser-induced
heating is simulated by a moving heat flux in a thermal analysis.
Specifying Progressive Element Activation and Scan Pattern Parameters
The layer-by-layer deposition of raw material from a recoater or roller blade is simulated
using progressive element activation in a structural or a thermal analysis. The following
steps are required to define the deposition process and scan pattern parameters completely:
Create a table collection with a name that
begins with "ABQ_TMP". The table collection must contain a
parameter table of type "ABQ_AM_ThermoMech_PatternBased_Activation" as well as the other
parameter tables listed below.
Define parameters of rectangular patches that make up a
rectangular unit cell (see Scan Pattern–Mesh Intersection), which is repeated to cover the cutting plane or a layer,
in a parameter table of type ABQ_AM_ThermoMech_PatternBased_Define. You can define the
following parameters: a local angle, ; the extents of a patch and ; and a label of the parameter table of type ABQ_AM_ThermoMech_ScanParameter_Define defining laser power
and other scan parameters to apply to this patch.
Refer to the table collection when you turn on
the progressive element activation feature. You can include only one option to turn on
progressive element activation in an analysis.
Abaqus activates elements automatically according to the specified pattern parameters and
automatically estimates the printing time of each layer. Abaqus assigns a local orientation for anisotropic materials to elements at the time of
activation based on the pattern definition. You must define an initial local orientation and
refer to it from the section definition for the elements that use an anisotropic
material.
A dedicated collection of parameter table, property table, and event series types is
available to include all of the definitions required by special-purpose techniques for
additive manufacturing. You can use the abaqus fetch utility to
obtain the file containing all of the type definitions of parameter tables, property tables,
and event series required by the special-purpose techniques for additive manufacturing as
follows:
abaqus fetch job=ABQ_am_special_purpose_types.inp
Specifying a Heat Source
The following steps are required to define the heat source completely that follow the
pattern parameters defined above:
In the parameter table, specify the name of the
table collection that is referred to when you turn on the progressive element activation
feature.
In the property table, define the absorption coefficient for the material.
Refer to the table collection in the
distributed load definition.
Abaqus computes and applies moving heat fluxes to each element automatically according to the
specified scanning trajectory. There may be more than one distributed load definition. Each
distributed load definition must refer to a different table collection. Element sets
referred to from distributed load definitions must be subsets of the element set referred to
when you specify elements that can be activated during an analysis.
Specifying Free Surface Radiation and Convective Heat Transfer
A scan pattern can be visualized over the part geometry by requesting element
solution-dependent field variables for output and plotting them as contours over the finite
element mesh. For a pattern-based analysis, the first two element solution-dependent field
variables are internally set to the patch ID and scan region ID, respectively (see Figure 1).