Representative volume element homogenisation approach to characterise additively manufactured porous metals

Abstract

Additive manufacturing represents a great candidate to boost smart materials expansion in the Industry 4.0 era through 4 D printing technologies. However, to fully exploit the benefits of these technologies, increasing knowledge is needed on how internal defects condition the overall behavior of the component. In this work, the Representative Volume Element approach is presented to investigate, through Finite Element Analyses, how micro-voids influence the stress-strain behavior of an AlSi10Mg additively manufactured through the Selective Laser Melting technique. An in-house code on the commercial software ANSYS Parametric Design Language APDL was developed to model a random pore distribution inside the RVE and to apply the boundary conditions necessary for the RVE periodicity; comparison with reference case studies from the literature are reported.

Keywords:

• Porosity
• FEM
• RVE
• additive manufacturing

Additional information

Funding

The study was financially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research - M.U.R. under the S.I.ADD project (P.O.N. Grant ARS01 00806).