A computationally efficient thermo-mechanical model with temporal acceleration for prediction of residual stresses and deformations in WAAM

The present paper introduces a novel temporal acceleration strategy for computationally efficient prediction of residual stresses and deformations in wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) components. It employs a semi-analytical approach, dividing temperature into the analytical and the complementary fields. The analytical field is obtained by a closed-form solution, and the complementary field is employed to solve the boundary conditions. A temporal acceleration factor for the heating period is applied. Meanwhile, the diffusion time in the analytical field is manipulated to guarantee accurate temperature prediction. Validation via WAAM experiments, including both a thin-wall structure and a practical engineering component with characteristic dimensions on the order of metres, indicates that the predicted stresses is 50 MPa lower than the experimental values. Moreover, the discrepancy of between the predicted deformations and the experimental measurements is less than 10%, demonstrating reasonable accuracy can be achieved with attractive computational efficiency.