Elmer Discussion Forum

Hello everyone:

As this is my first message in this forum and I haven’t found a place where new members should introduce themselves, I’ll start doing so here. I’m an electronics engineer who works as a researcher. As a consequence, Elmer has become an incredibly useful tool for my work (and for my personal projects) thanks to its open source nature (being able to study its code is great for understanding how simulations work).

Recently I saw a video where they show ANSYS capabilities for simulating 3d printed parts. Unluckily, they didn’t explain how those parts were homogenized, so I’m trying to recreate that using Elmer. According to some papers (I’ll edit this message to cite them), it might be possible to consider the part isotropic as long as deformations are kept within the elastic deformation range, which might be what ANSYS does (I haven’t tested it as I don’t have access to that software).

However, I was thinking about the possibility of simplifying the problem by dividing it. The exterior of the piece could be simulated as a shell while the interior could be homogenized using a similar technique as the ones used for simulating composite materials (I took a subject on that while I was at university).

Is that possible in Elmer? Have you successfully simulated 3d printed parts using it?

There was sometimes an EU initiative where we would have used Elmer to develop models for 3D printing. Unfortunately this project didn't fly.

To my understanding there are number of different techniques for 3D printing. Some of them are isotropic while others use filaments etc. that result to orthotropic materials. Also I guess there are various parts of the process that can be simulated, e.g. addition or the curing. Heat treatment can be essential part of many printing processes.

What we had in mind was maybe start off with the heat treatment of green parts where part of the material is vaporized leaving a smaller object of different shape. This opens the interesting question how the initial green part should be designed in order to have a desired shape as the outcome.

So devil lies in the detail. I suggest that you pinpoint the type of models that could be used in your case.

-Peter

Hello,

It's a real shame that the EU's initiative to develop models for 3D printing with Elmer didn't come to fruition. Indeed, 3D printing offers a multitude of techniques and possibilities, from heat treatment to simulation of the various stages of the process. I wonder whether a platform like Twitter could be an effective way of sharing ideas and experiences on these complex technical subjects.