Mesoscale Modeling of Extrusion and Solidification During Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing

In this work, we apply a multiphysics approach to fused deposition modeling to simulate extrusion and solidification. Restricting the work to a single line scan, we focus on the application of polylactic acid. In addition to heat, momentum and mass transfer, the solid/liquid/vapor interface is simulated using a front-tracking, level-set method. The results focus on the evolving temperature, viscosity, and volume fraction and are cast within a set of parametric studies, to include the printing and extrusion speed, as well as the extrusion temperature. Among other findings, it was observed that fused deposition modeling can be effectively modeled using a front-tracking method (i.e. the level set method) in concert with a temperature dependent porosity function. The use of the level-set method for discriminating the phase change interface in this context is relatively new and offers considerable advantages over existing methods.