Additive Manufacturing Simulation: A Review

Additive manufacturing is a printing successive layer process with the capability to manufacture complex geometries. Due to that the process consist on forming layers of material following a previously designed 3D shape, it is useful for many kind of materials as metals, ceramics, polymers, composites and biological systems. For many years, additive manufacturing was only used for prototypes, but now days, by its versatility, it is used in many industries, mainly in automotive and aerospace industry to manufacture components as gearboxes, airboxes, dashboards, motorcycle stands and suspension systems. However, this versatility can be also counterproductive because the measurement and control of the involved variables in this process is complicated, due to the different material’s properties. For this reason, a previous simulation results important before to carry out additive manufacturing process. This article is a review of research of additive manufacturing simulations with different materials, as well as their results, focusing on additive manufacturing processes with metals.