Additive manufacturing (AM) has made significant strides over the past 25 years. These processes, especially laser deposition processes for metal additive manufacturing, are making rapid inroads in diverse sectors of industry for rapid prototyping and production of complex three-dimensional objects as a manufacturing process rather than for prototyping. Multiple roadmap studies on AM manufacturing have identified technological and measurement challenges related to materials, process/equipment, qualification/certification, and modeling and simulation. The simulation and qualification of such parts are essential so that these are accepted by the industry and customers as a valid manufacturing approach. Additionally, technical challenges related to materials, equipment, machine/process variation and application continue to be major factors to be considered in producing quality parts and to establish the predicted lifetime of components under specific conditions based on material properties. The key challenge is that any simulation or prediction methodology is specific to one type of equipment, material or process. Even though the time to fabricate additively manufactured components could be reduced to 1/10th of the standard manufacturing processes, it still needs the same amount of time for testing and characterization, which could be as much as 1-2 years, with 9-18 samples tested under each fabrication condition. This is clearly not an acceptable situation. Therefore, what the industry needs is a simulation process that is not specific to a material/process/part and can be used by a variety of end users and design engineers. Such an approach is important and needed especially for metal-based AM.
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