An efficient finite element simulation method for additive manufacturing process

Accurate and efficient simulation of the thermal stress that occurs during the wire and arc additive manufacturing process plays an important role in the optimization of additive manufacturing processes. To improve the accuracy of the numerical simulations, we propose a two-stage modeling method in this work to reduce the number of artificial parameters required to perform the simulation. In the first stage, the single pass deposition process is simulated to calibrate the heat source parameters. Then, during the second stage, the component additive process is simulated using these calibrated parameters. To verify the proposed modeling method, wire and arc additive manufacturing experiments to fabricate a small step-shaped component and a large wall-shaped structure are performed. Comparison of the results obtained for the temperature field and the residual stress shows that the numerical results obtained using the two-stage modeling method show good agreement with the experimental results.