Introduction

In the past few years additive manufacturing (AM) has evolved to one of the most promising techniques for creating solid structures of virtually any shape. Yet, AM products and processes are often much more complex than those obtained through classical manufacturing techniques, raising new questions for numerical simulations.

Applications for AM products range across many fields in engineering, from design models to lightweight components for the automotive or aerospace industry, or to medical applications like patient specific implants.

AM processes involve multi-physics and multi-scale phenomena. Whereas relevant spatial scales range over many orders of magnitude, important time scales start at microseconds for physical processes and reach to hours or even days. Physics involved include mechanical, thermal, radiation and phase change problems. And most essential for simulation of AM is validation and verification. Last but not least a lack of appropriate manufacturing technologies hindered for a long time the realization of designs as obtained, e.g. by shape and/or topology optimization. In this regard AM is the ideal technology to transfer innovative design proposals to reality.