Implementation of Abaqus user subroutines and plugin for thermal analysis of powder-bed electron-beam-melting additive manufacturing process

Electron beam melting (EBM) is a metal powder bed fusion additive manufacturing (AM) technology that is widely used for making three-dimensional (3D) objects by adding materials layer by layer. EBM is a very complex thermal process which involves several physical phenomena such as moving heat source, material state change, and material deposition. Conventionally, these phenomena are implemented using in-house codes or embedding some user subroutines in commonly used commercial software packages, like Abaqus, which generally requires considerable expertise. Fortunately, recent versions of Abaqus offer a new plugin tool, AM Modeler, which provides a rather new and user-friendly method for performing additive manufacturing process simulation. In this work, taking Ti-6Al-4V as the particular example, we present all the details of the finite element (FE) implementation of both Abaqus user subroutines and AM Modeler plugin for thermal analysis of EBM additive manufacturing process. The melting pool shape and temperature profiles were predicted and verified against existing literature data. A 3D FE model was also developed to capture the heat transfer features in a real manufacturing process for printing a particular 3D object, “AM” characters, validating the capability of the proposed methods. To facilitate future design and thermal analysis of EBM process and to promote the use of AM Modeler plugin, the source codes including Abaqus user subroutines DFLUX and UMATHT as well as Python scripts for implementing AM Modeler are made available and could be downloaded from https://github.com/Dr-Ning-An/ebm-abaqus.