Methods for Modeling Metal Additive Manufacturing Deposition Using Computational Fluid Dynamics with a Commercial Package

With the growth of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry for metal components, there is an economic pressure for improved AM processes to overcome the shortcomings of current AM technologies (i.e., limited deposition rates, surface roughness, etc.). Unfortunately, the development of these processes can be time and capital-intensive due to the large number of input parameters and the sensitivity of the process’s outputs to said inputs. There consequently has been a strong push to develop computational design tools (such as CFD models) which can decrease the time and cost of AM technology developments. However, many of the developments that have been made to simulate AM through CFD have done so on custom CFD packages (as opposed to commercially available packages), which increases the barrier to entry of employing computational design tools. For that reason, this paper has demonstrated a method for simulating fused deposition modeling using a commercially available CFD package (Fluent). The results from this implementation are qualitatively promising when compared to samples produced by existing metal AM processes, however additional work is needed to validate the model more rigorously and to reduce the computational cost. Finally, the developed model was used to perform a parameter sweep, thereby demonstrating a use case of the tool to help in parameter optimization.