How to Use the Sintering Add-on in Ansys Mechanical

Hello everyone, my name is Tom Nobal, and today I'll be talking about the Sintering Add-on in Ansys Mechanical. The Sintering Add-on will simulate the sintering process where we take our component and we put it into an oven and apply it to various thermal cycles.

To use the add-on, I have started out by using a static structural analysis within Ansys Mechanical. To access the add-on, click on Add-ons, click on Sintering; you might need to click it twice to uncheck and check it again, and now it's appeared here under Sintering Process.

I'll go ahead and click on the Sintering Process. And you'll see here that it's added a couple of extra options, the Sintering Material and the Sinter Schedule. There are two ways that we can set up our Sintering process.

We can either go through the model tree and define the Sintering materials and schedule and other properties through here, or we can use a setup wizard. In this case, I'll use a setup wizard since it's quite handy and it helps save us a lot of time.

So right now, I'll go through and I'll walk you through the process of using the Setup Wizard in Ansys Mechanical. So first, we'll start out by selecting the part by clicking Apply, and then we'll select the base. If you want, we can also use this option as the named selection.

The next step is to select the contact region. We go here, we select this contact region, which was automatically generated when we imported the part. Doing this will also automatically update the contact settings. In this case, we want to leave these options as they are.

When we click next, we'll see that those options that were specified here in the wizard have been updated in this contact. So small sliding has been set to off, and the stiffness has been updated to each iteration aggressive, and that coefficient of friction is also defined.

We'll go ahead and define the constraints. We need to define a fixed support, and we'll scope it to the bottom of the base plate. The next step is to generate a mesh. I'll leave the settings as is, and I'll show you that we can still go back and modify the mesh settings later.

Right now, we want this to have the gravity in the negative z direction, so we'll leave that option as is. Now we need to define the material. In this case, I'm going to use the default material within the Sintering module, the STRI16L. And for now, I'll just use the Type 1 Sintering model.

We can define the initial relative density, the mean powder diameter, and the Sintering activation temperature. Go ahead, and I'll modify this to 1000. When I click next, you'll see that it's added the Sinter Material to the Model Tree.

For a Sintering analysis, there's a large number of different parameters that we need to specify for the Sinter Material, and finding these material properties can be quite challenging. So now we need to define the Sinter Schedule.

So for that, we click on Add, and then we input the target temperature here, as well as how long it takes to get there.

The room temperature will define what temperature the part will start at, and now, so in this case, the part will start at 22 degrees Celsius, and then ramp up to 1380 degrees Celsius over a duration of 7200 seconds.

Then we'll add another object, specify the same temperature, and we'll set it to 3600 seconds. So now this part will ramp up to the target temperature over about two hours, and then it will stay at that temperature for another hour. As we click next, we'll see the Sinter schedule gets defined here.

We can also automatically define some of the settings, such as those that would go into the analysis settings. These are some of the default settings, and we'll leave this as is. Alright, and that is it. We have successfully set up a Sintering model.

If we click on Analysis Settings, actually, if we first let's generate the Sinter schedule. If we go to Analysis Settings, we can see that it's created a multi-step analysis.

This mesh is a little bit coarse for my liking, so I'm going to go ahead and I'll just set the default element size to something a little bit smaller. I probably want to set the body sizing to this to 1 as well. And this seems a little bit better.

So now that I'm happy with these mesh settings, I go ahead and click Solve. First, let's update the Sinter schedule, and then let's click Solve. Okay, now our simulation is done. In this case, it took about two minutes to solve.

The Sintering add-on provides us with several result objects that are specific to Sintering. So one result object we get is relative density. You also get viscosity, Sinter stress, and grain size.

We can look at the total deformation and see how much the part has contracted during the Sintering process. We can animate this image by clicking on this play sign, but we can also change some settings for the animation.

We can see how the part expands slowly while it heats up and then under the baking process it contracts very sharply. Thank you for joining me in this exploration of the Sintering add-on process in Ansys Mechanical. Please contact us at https://ozeninc.com/contact for more information.