Speaker
Description
CANCELLED
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A key challenge in hybrid lightweight design is the joining of dissimilar materials such as metal and plastic. Environmentally and resource-orientated solutions are form-fit connections, as there is no need for additional adhesives. A current approach is the use of aluminium foam structures established in lightweight design to serve as undercuts that can be used for bonding with polymer. In this study, the polymer is additively manufactured on top of the aluminium foam. The filling of the pores in the aluminium foam by the polymer essentially influences the bond strength of the composite. A simulation-based process modelling was created to investigate and evaluate the mechanical interlocking. This virtual process chain includes the geometric modelling of aluminium foam structures, the process simulation of additive manufacturing using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model with Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) and a subsequent structural-mechanical analysis using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Hence, for a numerical analysis of the mechanical interlocking, the pore filling from the CFD needs to be mapped onto the mechanical model. Thegeneration of the geometry of the polymer in the pores from the CFD model and the subsequent meshing for the structural-mechanical model often leads to discretization problems due to highly distorted elements. In order to overcome this problem, the geometric modelling of the polymer surface with Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) is investigated in this contribution. In particular, the fitting of multi-patch NURBS surfaces to the nodes of the polymer mesh calculated in the CFD model is investigated. With this method, the polymer surface can be interpolated for different pore fillings by the displacement of the control points, which reduces the number of simulations of the additive manufacturing process and contributes to the optimisation of the process parameters. Furthermore, this approach can be adapted to model the free surface in common additively manufactured polymer parts.
