Simulation of Temperature Profile in Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing

Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is a metal-additive manufacturing process that uses electric arc as the heat source to melt metallic wire available as feedstock and deposit it layer upon layer to form a 3D object. This comparatively cheaper additive manufacturing technology than other additive manufacturing processes can manufacture medium-to-large size components at a higher material deposition rate that can be reached up to 10 kg/h. However, the major limitation of this process is to deal with complex heat configurations that prevailed during the material deposition. Modeling and simulation of the WAAM process provide an efficient way to detect such challenges and provide ways to reduce them. In this research work, simulation of the WAAM process has been carried out using Simufact Welding software for 316L stainless steel material. The components designing and meshing have been done by using MSC Apex software, and the famous Goldak double ellipsoidal model was used for simulating the moving heat source. The simulation have been performed for total four-layer deposition. The obtained thermal cycle through simulation result shows the same pattern as the available experimental results in the previous literature.