Simulating and Predicting the Part Warping in Fused Deposition Modeling by Thermal-Structural Coupling Analysis

As the most commonly used additive manufacturing technology, fused deposition modeling (FDM) still faces some technical issues caused by temperature change-induced unsteady thermal stress and warping. These issues can further lead to the deformation of printed parts and even terminate the printing process. In response to these issues, this article established a numerical model of temperature field and thermal stress field for FDM by finite element modeling and "birth-death element" technique to predict the deformation of the part. What makes sense in this process is that the logic of elements sort based on ANSYS Parametric Design Language (APDL) was proposed to sort the meshed elements, which was aimed to perform FDM simulation quickly on the model. In this work, the effects of the sheets shape and infill line directions (ILDs) on the distortion during FDM were simulated and verified. From the analysis of stress field and deformation nephogram, the simulation results indicated that ILD had greater effects on the distortion. Moreover, the sheet warping became most serious when the ILD was aligned with the diagonal of the sheet. The simulation results matched well with the experimental results. Thus, the proposed method in this work can be used to optimize the printing parameters for FDM process.