Bracket distortion after cutting the base plate.
Simufact Engineering has announced the launch of Simufact Additive, a new piece of software for the simulation of metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes.
The software and manufacturing process simulation expert has developed a powerful and scalable process simulation environment for the optimisation of laser powder bed fusion processes. The software provides simulation for all key AM steps including printing, heat treatment, cutting the part off the build plate and removal of support structures, plus heat and pressure combined processes (HIP).
The modelling is carried out using CAD data in an innovative and newly developed Graphical User Interface (GUI) environment aligned with the real process workflow. Simufact Additive starts with defining the general process by determining the part and support components, and takes the user through to defining manufacturing parameters, analysis settings and ultimate results.
“Today companies employing AM technology for printing metal parts have to cope with failure in their production processes and the high knock on costs associated with this,” Michael Wohlmuth, Simufact`s CEO explained. “Simufact Additive is an important tool which will help these companies get it ‘right first time’, by regularly running simulations prior to production.”
Manifold part effective stress after cutting the base plate.
The software lays the foundation for wide variability and scalability through different levels of details. This includes both a fast mechanical method for the prediction of distortion and residual stresses up to a fully thermo-mechanically coupled transient analysis, which will be released soon. This will determine the temperature history and derived properties like the microstructure. The properties of the final part are available for a subsequent structural simulations.
Simufact`s CTO Dr. Hendrik Schafstall, commented: “For the technical heart of the software we developed an application-specific solver based on MSC’s powerful generic Marc solver. Simufact Additive will be able to capture the complete process chain in the manufacturing environment and to scale the simulation based on the user requirements. The key driver is accuracy followed by speed. Therefore, we have developed a completely new infrastructure specially dedicated to AM.”
Simufact Additive comes with an intuitive and user-friendly GUI which enables machine and application-specific dialogs aligned with the real process workflow. A meshing capability is included for the automatic and rapid discretisation of even large and complex structures of any shape.
Renishaw is the first 3D printing machine vendor to collaborate with Simufact, coupling its QuantAM open API build preparation software with Simufact process simulation software. The next step is to automatically set-up a simulation based on the build information and in return to display the simulation results in QuantAM.
Simufact will launch Simufact Additive at the TCT Show on 28-29th September 2016 at NEC, Birmingham. Register for FREE to attend.
