Book of the Week: Thermo-Mechanical Modeling of Additive Manufacturing

Thermo-Mechanical Modeling of Additive Manufacturing [Source: Amazon]

This week’s selection is “Thermo-Mechanical Modeling of Additive Manufacturing” by Michael Gouge and Pan Michaleris.

Just to get this straight up, this book is pretty detailed. It’s a collection of case studies and knowledge pieces focusing on the issue of thermal management during additive manufacturing operations.

This is a severe issue in metal 3D printing operations, and the reason for it is quite straightforward. To fuse metal powder into solid forms, vast energy is focused to produce the tremendous heat required. These extreme temperatures are significantly different from the surrounding environment in the build chamber.

These vast temperature gradients wreak havoc on 3D prints. Hotter metals expand, cooler metals shrink. The result is bending and warping of the print.

That’s why most metal 3D printing operations include a squad of engineers to work out complex thermal models of a print to understand how it will play out during printing.

Sometimes support structures are added to carry residual heat away from critical portions of the geometry. Other times support structures are added to prevent a component from curling away from its intended position.

There are even cases where the print and its support are designed in such a way that when the support is removed and the print is cut off from the build plate, the final model “springs” into its desired form.

Analyzing thermal flows and determining solutions is a highly complex business. This book reviews many aspects of that analysis.

Among the topics discussed are:

• FEA method for thermo-mechanical modeling

• Convection boundary losses

• Conduction losses due to part fixturing

• Microstructure and mechanical properties

• Understanding microstructure evolution

• Modeling microstructures

• Thermo-mechanical modeling of thin walls

• Residual stress and distortion modeling

• Thermo-mechanical modeling of large builds

• Migration of distortion in large prints

• Dynamic adaptive mesh coarsening strategies for simulation

• Thermo-mechanical model development

• Evolution of distortion models

If you work with or intend to work with metal 3D printers, this may be a book for you. Managers considering the use of the technology may also find this useful as it illustrates in some depth the type of work required to implement metal 3D printing.

Via Amazon