Design of product and process for Metal Additive Manufacturing - From design to manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a recent new manufacturing approach that is based on the fabrication of each object using a layer-by-layer strategy. From a manufacturability perspective of components, this approach involves the possibility to manufacture parts of any geometric complexity without using additional tools and machines. Particular attention is dedicated to the powder bed fusion (PBF) AM processes in which a laser beam or an electron beam is used to sinter or melt metallic powders which are named Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Electron Beam Melting (EBM). In fact, in these last years, growing interesting of the industry has been outlined for metal AM, because they offer exclusive benefits such as the direct production of complex functional and/or end-usable parts made with excellent materials. Today it is thus recognised the need for guidelines and tools for effective introduction of the AM processes in the metal industry. To address this issue the aim of the presented thesis was to propose concurrent engineering (CE) tools based on a comprehensive approach from design to manufacturing. The metal PBF-AM processes have been dealt by two subsequent steps. The first one addressed the development of a process selection (PS) tool that combines materials, processes and designs for the choice of the best alternative to produce a metal component. The second one concerned with the development of a model for the process simulation that can contribute to the understanding of the process. The proposed PS tool aimed to introduce the metal AM processes as alternative to producing components. In particular, the tool was implemented in order to consider the comparison between different metal AM manufacturing processes as well as AM, machining and casting. In this approach, each alternative is represented by a combination of the design, material and process features. A well-structured open architecture for PS has been suggested. The tool works by considering the requirements of the component regarding geometry constraints and specifications. A methodology based on mathematical modeling design decisions involving multiple attributes was suggested to assess the technical and economic aspects in order to analyse and rank the alternatives. For this purpose, an index, called DePri, was introduced to resume technical aspects and offers a quantitative comparison between the alternatives. On the other, the economic aspect for AM has been addressed by providing a detail model cost. The results of the process selection in which the technical aspect of each alternative has been considered and the alternatives can be compared with the corresponding manufacturing cost. An application of the proposed tool was demonstrated by an industrial case study in which the objective was to assess the best technology resource between 3-axis CNC machining, SLM and EBM for future investments of the company in the AM technologies. The second issue addresses the optimisation of the metal PBF-AM process by virtual simulation for a suitable selection of the process parameters. In this context, the resulting review showed the SLM as a consolidated process respect to process simulation while EBM has received less attention despite the numerous applications in the medical and aerospace fields. In order to improve the effectiveness and reliability of EBM FE simulation, a new type of modelling has been introduced for the energy source and the powder material properties which have been included in a thermal numerical model. The potential of the proposed modelling was demonstrated using comparison with existing experimental literature data for a single straight line, existing model in published literature and experimental measurements for multibeam and continuous line melting. The model was then used to investigate the effects of the process parameters on the microstructures of a TiAl alloy.