ICME makes it easier to optimize 3D printing operations

Additive manufacturing epitomizes the marriage of physical production processes and digital data. It drives manufacturing innovation and efficiency by enabling digital data to take shape as a physical product.

Like any manufacturing process, though, AM involves a journey from an idealized CAD file to a viable product that meets quality and repeatability requirements. Success is largely dependent on using design for additive manufacturing to optimize material topology and resolve problems such as internal stresses and other deviations from the ideal with the guidance of simulation tools.

Sharing Knowledge

To fully exploit AM’s benefits—greater design freedom, product personalization, and shorter design cycles—users need to consider how the plethora of available materials and processes can help them achieve their goals. Keeping track of what’s available on the market is a challenge for anyone who is not a specialist. And the current fragmentation of existing AM data limits the technology’s future success.

Fragmented additive data raises barriers to innovation by making it difficult for manufacturers to mix and match materials and machines to create novel work flows and products. Material and process selection are intertwined and dictate the design space of a product, including its cost, weight, how it will perform, and even its environmental impact.

The lack of data on materials and processes also prevents design teams from confidently applying modern computer-aided engineering (CAE) methods to parts that could be additively manufactured.

It’s especially crucial in large organizations to share material data and process insights. Valuable lessons can be learned from already-conducted AM trials, failed prototypes, or material and quality testing that have not been shared among departments.

When AM project teams perform in silos, there’s a greater risk of failed prototypes and wasted materials, time, and money. Silos prolong the time needed to bring products to market and slow AM adoption throughout the organization.

Unified Approach

Owing to the relative newness of AM materials and technologies, 3D printing poses new quality challenges. Designers’ unfamiliarity with the behavior of AM materials and processes often results in flawed end products. Predicting and preventing these flaws at the design stage requires accurate material and machine data, as well as process simulation.

Pioneering additive manufacturers are benefiting from integrated computational materials engineering (ICME), an emerging approach to unifying digital processes—from materials development to design engineering to manufacturing. ICME ensures use of the optimal combination of materials and manufacturing processes to innovate and maximize performance, which reduces costs and lead time.

ICME is an approach that seeks to understand the behavior of materials at multiple scales. This is well-illustrated by Boeing, which coined the phrase “atoms to airplanes.”

The goal is to design and fully exploit materials from chemical composition to microstructure to coupon and manufactured part. In practice, integrating these scales means integrating historically siloed disciplines to attain the optimal result. This integration means that designers can predict the effect that their colleagues’ choice of materials and manufacturing processes will have on product performance and design optimization.

ICME has been a topic of cutting-edge research since the late 20th century because of its power to accelerate the discovery and application of novel materials. What’s changed is that we now have mature modelling capabilities, accessible computing power, and technology ecosystems working toward this common goal.

e-Xstream engineering, part of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, recently introduced 10xICME. An industrial solution portfolio designed to leverage the potential of ICME, it enables design, materials, and manufacturing professionals to collaborate virtually to develop products using detailed proprietary material models and process definitions from 3D printer suppliers, OEMs, R&D institutes, and end users.

10xICME recently expanded to include the Senvol Database, a comprehensive database of AM materials and machines. The addition provides on-demand access to teams seeking to evaluate current 3D printing market capabilities against their new-product goals.

Materials engineers, for example, can work with production to compare 3D printers and never-used materials against historical data about the materials, processes, and suppliers in order to develop a shortlist of options. The material candidates then can be analyzed directly in CAE tools to explore design concepts and perform basic assessments. Thereafter, the product development team can request access to the shortlisted proprietary material system models and machine toolpaths from the suppliers.

Armed with such accurate data, materials professionals can virtually explore the performance limits of the material “as manufactured” and enable design and engineering to make optimal use of AM processes to produce a better product.

This integration gives manufacturers instant on-demand access to insights from virtual testing and development and subsequent physical testing, resulting in AM knowledge being continuously transferred from one use-case to another in a virtuous circle.

Integrating AM material and process data into product development—from concept to customer—will help build confidence in new techniques and spur the design of bolder products.