PROCSIMA stands for “PROCess SIMulation for Additive manufacturing” and is a SIM ICON project.

PROCSIMA targets to enable a better understanding of the metal Additive Manufacturing printing and post-processing steps and how they affect part performance, using multi-physics, multi-scale process simulation validated with measurements. The project aims at increasing the understanding of how phenomena at different length- and time-scales interact to define the final performance of a part, while at the same time ensuring efficient execution of the simulation workflow (a significant challenge considering the wide spread in timescale and dimensions at which different phenomena take place). It will contain efforts on three critical domains:

(i) process simulation at meso- and micro-scale – accurately predicting the impact of the AM process down to the microstructural level,

(ii) virtual material characterization – tackling the issues of predicting material properties from micro-structural, high-fidelity models and ensuring proper computational performance of the different simulation scales and

(iii) AM-enhanced performance simulation at the part level – looking at structural and fatigue performance including the effects of AM. These domains will be further supported by development of numerical tools (e.g. model order reductions, surrogate models and engineering tools) to increase the computational efficiency of the overall simulation, ensuring a PROCSIMA workflow suitable for industrial applications.

The project will lead to an innovative combination of different research domains and integrate the results into a streamlined industrial method and corresponding prototype software toolsets which will enable better exploitation of the metal AM for structurally loaded components.

The PROCSIMA project will be part of the SIM M3 program (MacroModelMat) that focuses on macro-level predictive modeling, design and optimization of advanced lightweight material systems and is being extended towards manufacturing simulation.

The PROCSIMA project is coordinated by Siemens Industry Software and the consortium comprises of the companies ESMA, Materialise and SABCA, and the academic partners UGent (Mechanics of Materials and Structures Group) and KU Leuven (MTM, PMA and NUMA departments).