No Arabic abstract
This work introduces an innovative parallel, fully-distributed finite element framework for growing geometries and its application to metal additive manufacturing. It is well-known that virtual part design and qualification in additive manufacturing requires highly-accurate multiscale and multiphysics analyses. Only high performance computing tools are able to handle such complexity in time frames compatible with time-to-market. However, efficiency, without loss of accuracy, has rarely held the centre stage in the numerical community. Here, in contrast, the framework is designed to adequately exploit the resources of high-end distributed-memory machines. It is grounded on three building blocks: (1) Hierarchical adaptive mesh refinement with octree-based meshes; (2) a parallel strategy to model the growth of the geometry; (3) state-of-the-art parallel iterative linear solvers. Computational experiments consider the heat transfer analysis at the part scale of the printing process by powder-bed technologies. After verification against a 3D benchmark, a strong-scaling analysis assesses performance and identifies major sources of parallel overhead. A third numerical example examines the efficiency and robustness of (2) in a curved 3D shape. Unprecedented parallelism and scalability were achieved in this work. Hence, this framework contributes to take on higher complexity and/or accuracy, not only of part-scale simulations of metal or polymer additive manufacturing, but also in welding, sedimentation, atherosclerosis, or any other physical problem where the physical domain of interest grows in time.
Numerical simulations are used in this work to investigate aspects of microstructure and microsegregation during rapid solidification of a Ni-based superalloy in a laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing process. Thermal modeling by finite element analysis simulates the laser melt pool, with surface temperatures in agreement with in situ thermographic measurements on Inconel 625. Geometric and thermal features of the simulated melt pools are extracted and used in subsequent mesoscale simulations. Solidification in the melt pool is simulated on two length scales. For the multicomponent alloy Inconel 625, microsegregation between dendrite arms is calculated using the Scheil-Gulliver solidification model and DICTRA software. Phase-field simulations, using Ni-Nb as a binary analogue to Inconel 625, produced microstructures with primary cellular/dendritic arm spacings in agreement with measured spacings in experimentally observed microstructures and a lesser extent of microsegregation than predicted by DICTRA simulations. The composition profiles are used to compare thermodynamic driving forces for nucleation against experimentally observed precipitates identified by electron and X-ray diffraction analyses. Our analysis lists the precipitates that may form from FCC phase of enriched interdendritic compositions and compares these against experimentally observed phases from 1 h heat treatments at two temperatures: stress relief at 1143 K (870{deg}C) or homogenization at 1423 K (1150{deg}C).
In the industrial practice, additive manufacturing processes are often followed by post-processing operations such as subtractive machining, milling, etc. to achieve the desired surface quality and dimensional accuracy. Hence, a given part must be 3D printed with extra material to enable such finishing phase. This combined additive/subtractive technique can be optimized to reduce manufacturing costs by saving printing time and reducing material and energy usage. In this work, a numerical methodology based on parametric shape optimization is proposed for optimizing the thickness of the extra material, allowing for minimal machining operations while ensuring the finishing requirements. Moreover, the proposed approach is complemented by a novel algorithm for generating inner structures leading to reduced distortion and improved weight reduction. The computational effort induced by classical constrained optimization methods is alleviated by replacing both the objective and constraint functions by their sparse-grid surrogates. Numerical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
We present a novel method for finite element analysis of inelastic structures containing Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs). Phenomenological constitutive models for SMAs lead to material nonlinearities, that require substantial computational effort to resolve. Finite element analysis methods, which rely on Gauss quadrature integration schemes, must solve two sets of coupled differential equations: one at the global level and the other at the local, i.e. Gauss point level. In contrast to the conventional return mapping algorithm, which solves these two sets of coupled differential equations separately using a nested Newton procedure, we propose a scheme to solve the local and global differential equations simultaneously. In the process we also derive closed-form expressions used to update the internal state variables, and unify the popular closest-point and cutting plane methods with our formulas. Numerical testing indicates that our method allows for larger thermomechanical loading steps and provides increased computational efficiency, over the standard return mapping algorithm.
Motivation: Agent-based modeling is an indispensable tool for studying complex biological systems. However, existing simulators do not always take full advantage of modern hardware and often have a field-specific software design. Results: We present a novel simulation platform called BioDynaMo that alleviates both of these problems. BioDynaMo features a general-purpose and high-performance simulation engine. We demonstrate that BioDynaMo can be used to simulate use cases in: neuroscience, oncology, and epidemiology. For each use case we validate our findings with experimental data or an analytical solution. Our performance results show that BioDynaMo performs up to three orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art baseline. This improvement makes it feasible to simulate each use case with one billion agents on a single server, showcasing the potential BioDynaMo has for computational biology research. Availability: BioDynaMo is an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license and is available at www.biodynamo.org. Instructions to reproduce the results are available in supplementary information. Contact:
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Supplementary information: Available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4501515
In this work we formally derive and prove the correctness of the algorithms and data structures in a parallel, distributed-memory, generic finite element framework that supports h-adaptivity on computational domains represented as forest-of-trees. The framework is grounded on a rich representation of the adaptive mesh suitable for generic finite elements that is built on top of a low-level, light-weight forest-of-trees data structure handled by a specialized, highly parallel adaptive meshing engine, for which we have identified the requirements it must fulfill to be coupled into our framework. Atop this two-layered mesh representation, we build the rest of data structures required for the numerical integration and assembly of the discrete system of linear equations. We consider algorithms that are suitable for both subassembled and fully-assembled distributed data layouts of linear system matrices. The proposed framework has been implemented within the FEMPAR scientific software library, using p4est as a practical forest-of-octrees demonstrator. A strong scaling study of this implementation when applied to Poisson and Maxwell problems reveals remarkable scalability up to 32.2K CPU cores and 482.2M degrees of freedom. Besides, a comparative performance study of FEMPAR and the state-of-the-art deal.ii finite element software shows at least comparative performance, and at most factor 2-3 improvements in the h-adaptive approximation of a Poisson problem with first- and second-order Lagrangian finite elements, respectively.