Efficient Prediction of Thermal Stresses and Distortion in Complex Optimized Missile Structures

TDA has teamed up with Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) as its subcontractor to address the target SBIR topic objectives of (a) increasing computational efficiency of AM calculations, (b) modeling strategies for complex geometries with support structures, (c) optimizing support structures for these geometries, and (d) integrating the tools with existing metal AM machines interface software. TDA plans to improve the in-house fully automated thermo-mechanical AM finite element numerical simulation tool, especially to rapidly calculate distortions and residual stresses. Our model follows an ICME framework for multi-scale AM simulation module consisting of a coarse-grain module for component level processing and a high fidelity module capturing material local behavior. Based on our experience, two surrogate models are selected for the proposed work and will be used to meet the requirements of computational efficiency; the main advantage of these techniques is their proven computational efficiency when properly trained. We also propose a novel topology optimization approach for the support structure which will help minimizing the overhang distortions; the simplicity of its computation guarantees a fast and robust solution. The target is to achieve high computational efficiency to meet the desired objective of calculating distortions of a small bracket (4x2.5x2 in3) within 5 minutes.