STTR Phase I: A Next-Generation Computationally Efficient Software for Simulating Additive Manufacturing Processes of Metals

The broader impact of this Small Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project is to advance simulation software with high computational speed and efficiency for small-scale manufacturing. The proposed technology will perform simulations faster (from days to hours) using a fraction of current resources (from clusters to desktop), while still capturing the underlying physics accurately. Such a powerful tool will serve as a platform that facilitates more innovations in the field of additive manufacturing, bringing paradigm changes in part design and material development. This will bring efficiency improvements of 50-100x to many industrial sectors. This STTR Phase I project addresses low computational efficiency of existing manufacturing process simulation models due to the finite element analysis (FEA) framework on which the models rely. The proposed innovation consists of three novel concepts: a new FEA framework called additive FEA (AFEA) framework, and two methods called Topologically Conformal Regenerative Discretization (TCRD) and Hybrid Modeling (HM). The proposed project will advance these techniques for computational simulation of AM processes for metals, engineering them for translation at industrial scale. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.