Rapid Simulations of Welding and AM using LS-DYNA® and LS-PrePost®

Simulation of the welding process in LS-DYNA has been continuously improving the recent years. The functionality in terms of solvers, materials, heat source and preprocessing GUI have been continuously expanded. One of the issues that remains to be solved is the sometimes quite long simulation times. The solution time of a welding simulation depends largely on the length and speed of the weld. This is especially true in Additive Manufacturing (AM) applications where the length of the weld can be very long. To remedy this problem, a dumping methodology is presented. The methodology still uses a thermo-mechanical approach, but the weld energy is dumped in the complete weld rather than applied incrementally. This paper presents the methodology in detail together with examples and comparisons in both welding and AM applications.