Unlocking the Full Potential of Additive Manufacturing with Ansys Additive Solutions
Additive manufacturing (AM) has revolutionized the way engineers design and produce complex parts, offering unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. However, to fully harness its benefits, a robust simulation-driven approach is essential at every stage of the process—from design optimization to printing and post-processing. Ansys provides a comprehensive suite of Additive solutions tailored to address these critical stages, ensuring precision, reliability, and performance. In this blog, we’ll explore how each Ansys Additive product—ranging from process simulation to material analysis—plays a crucial role in enhancing the AM workflow, minimizing risks, and maximizing print success.
Additive universe
Let's see how the AM ecosystem is managed by the Ansys tools:
- Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM). Engineering approach that optimizes designs specifically for additive manufacturing (AM) processes, rather than simply adapting traditional designs for 3D printing. DfAM leverages the unique capabilities of AM, such as complex geometries, lightweight structures, and material efficiency, to enhance performance while reducing weight, cost, and production time. Key principles of DfAM include topology optimization, lattice structures, part consolidation, and minimizing support material to improve manufacturability and post-processing. Important tools here are Discovery and Mechanical. The first allows for rapid geometry modifications, lattice and light weight geometry creation and making it easy to refine complex shapes optimized for additive manufacturing. The topology optimization tools help engineers generate lightweight, organic structures that maintain strength while reducing material usage. For this task both Discovery and Mechanical can be used. Prostheses is a well known example of topology optimization in Biomedical applications.
- Build Setup refers to the preparation process before printing, ensuring a successful and efficient build. It involves orienting the part, positioning multiple parts on the build plate, generating support structures, and defining printing parameters such as layer thickness, scan strategy, and material settings. Proper build setup is crucial for minimizing distortions, optimizing material usage, and reducing post-processing efforts.
Ansys Additive Prep is the tool that allows you to prepare parts that will be additively manufactured. Additive Prep is built into Ansys SpaceClaim and tightly integrated into the additive workflow, whether you will be continuing your workflow by simulating the AM process or sending your part(s) directly to the build chamber. Orient your part(s) based on your priorities of build time, volume of supports, and distortion tendency, and then automatically generate supports for them. Adjust your build strategy and parameters, generate a build file and then view and animate the scan vectors within a slice or the slices within a build in the Slice Viewer. The resulting optimally oriented parts and supports with associated scan pattern are ready for print or for simulation using Additive Print or Mechanical. In the image, support geometries generated by Ansys Additive Prep.
- Process Simulation in Additive Manufacturing involves using computational models to predict and analyze the physical phenomena occurring during the printing process. It helps engineers understand thermal effects, residual stresses, distortions, and potential defects such as warping, overheating, or lack of fusion. By simulating factors like heat distribution, material behavior, and support interaction, process simulation enables the optimization of build parameters, part orientation, and support structures before printing. This reduces costly trial-and-error iterations, enhances part quality, and ensures greater reliability and repeatability in AM production.
Tools like Ansys Additive Print – A stand alone tool for 3D Print machine operators to perform quick simulations of parts to ensure they will print successfully by predicting part distortion treads, recommending and validating build preparation (orientation and support needs), Reducing prototype testing
Included with Additive Print and Additive Suite licenses.
More advanced simulations can be performed in Ansys Mechanical to predict the macro-level distortions and stresses in parts to prevent build failures and provide trend data for improving designs for additive manufacturing including part orientation and support placement and sizing using different add-ons:
In Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF)—also known as DMLM, DMLS, or SLM—a thin layer of metal powder is deposited, and a highly focused laser beam melts the powder, fusing it to the previous layer. This process is repeated layer by layer, forming a solid part. The first layer is deposited on a build plate or substrate, providing a foundation for the structure.
In Directed Energy Deposition (DED)—also called LENS, EBAM®, WAAM, or LDT—a laser or electron beam creates a melt pool on previously solidified material, where either blown powder or fed wire is introduced to add material. Unlike LPBF, which builds parts from a powder bed, DED enables localized material deposition, making it suitable for repairs, coatings, and larger structures.
Both PBF and DED processes generate high temperatures and steep thermal gradients, leading to overheating, distortion, and residual stresses. These stresses can cause significant deformation, interfere with subsequent layer deposition, or even lead to cracks and part detachment from the build plate. Additionally, once the part is removed from the build plate, residual stresses can introduce further distortions, resulting in deviations from the intended geometry.
Sintering process simulations help predict shrinkage and gravitational warpage in complex parts, reducing trial-and-error during design while expanding the range of viable geometries. Once a material system is well-calibrated with repeatable results, compensation algorithms can be applied to modify the design, ensuring the final shape meets dimensional specifications.
It is also well known that CAD models often require adjustments to compensate for distortions occurring during the manufacturing process. Distortion compensation in simulation software serves as a powerful tool to correct for these deviations. The process of achieving a distortion-compensated geometry may involve a single solve or require multiple iterations, depending on the application and tolerance requirements. Selecting the appropriate approach depends on factors such as material properties, manufacturing constraints, and final part specifications. - Material analysis. This tool is an exploratory environment for scientists hosted in the same stand alone interface as Additive Print. The goal of Additive Science is to determine the best process-parameter combination to use for building your part, given a LPBF machine and a material. You begin this exploration with a Single Bead Parametric simulation to narrow the process-parameter combinations down to a smaller number of acceptable candidates based upon melt pool dimensions. Typically you will then want to do a Porosity simulation using your chosen parameters from the Single Bead simulation to determine the lack-of-fusion porosity associated with those process parameters. Finally, Microstructure simulations reveal information about grain patterns and may be compared to Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) laboratory tests.
- Data Capture and Management. Ansys Granta plays a significant role in the data capture and analysis step of the additive manufacturing cycle by providing a comprehensive solution for managing materials data. With Ansys Granta MI, engineers can capture and analyze the right information from their additive manufacturing projects, which helps in getting solutions to market faster and improving the understanding of critical process and property relationships. The integration of easy-to-use Machine Learning into Granta MI reduces trial and error in additive manufacturing, optimizing data and project knowledge. Additionally, Granta MI ensures efficient, traceable materials testing and analysis processes, from the test lab to design data, which maximizes the return on investment. This is particularly important in additive manufacturing, where understanding the material properties and process parameters is crucial for part qualification and achieving the full potential of the technology.
- Part Qualification. The ANSYS ecosystem plays a crucial role in Part Qualification for Additive Manufacturing (AM) by integrating design validation, structural and thermal analysis, and document control to ensure high-quality, certifiable parts. ANSYS Additive Suite enables engineers to validate designs through topology optimization and distortion compensation, ensuring manufacturability. ANSYS Mechanical and Fluent perform structural and thermal analyses, predicting stress, residual strains, and heat distribution to prevent failures. ANSYS Granta MI ensures traceability by capturing material data, process parameters, and test results, streamlining document control and certification for regulatory compliance in industries like aerospace and medical devices. This holistic approach minimizes trial-and-error, reducing costs and accelerating AM part approval.
Conclusion
Ansys Additive Solutions provide a powerful, simulation-driven approach to unlocking the full potential of Additive Manufacturing (AM). By integrating design validation, build preparation, process simulation, material analysis, and data management, Ansys ensures precision, reliability, and efficiency throughout the AM workflow. From DfAM principles and topology optimization to thermal stress prediction and distortion compensation, Ansys tools help engineers reduce trial-and-error, optimize part performance, and accelerate part qualification and certification. By leveraging Granta MI for data traceability and Additive Suite for advanced simulations, manufacturers can confidently produce high-quality, certifiable parts while minimizing production risks and costs.
Additional resources
Some additional Additive manufacturing videos developed by Ozen inc.
Ozen Engineering Expertise
Ozen leverages its extensive consulting expertise in CFD, FEA, optics, photonics, and electromagnetic simulations to achieve exceptional results across various engineering projects, addressing complex challenges like multiphase flows, erosion modeling, and channel flows using Ansys software.
We offer support, mentoring, and consulting services to enhance the performance and reliability of your hydraulic systems. Trust our proven track record to accelerate projects, optimize performance, and deliver high-quality, cost-effective results for both new and existing water control systems. For more information, please visit https://ozeninc.com.