AdditiveFOAM is a free, open source heat and mass transfer software for simulations of Additive Manufacturing (AM) released by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is built upon OpenFOAM, a free, open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package released by the OpenFOAM Foundation.

If you use AdditiveFoam in your work, please cite the source code. Also, please consider citing relevant AdditiveFOAM Publications.

• John Coleman
• Kellis Kincaid
• Gerry L. Knapp
• Benjamin Stump
• Alex Plotkowski
• Sam T. Reeve

Some select publications using AdditiveFOAM are provided:

1. Coleman et al. "Sensitivity of Thermal Predictions to Uncertain Surface Tension Data in Laser Additive Manufacturing", J. Heat Transfer (2020) HT-19-1539
2. Knapp et al. "Calibrating uncertain parameters in melt pool simulations of additive manufacturing", Comp. Mat. Sci. (2023) 111904
3. Rolchigo et al. "ExaCA: A performance portable exascale cellular automata application for alloy solidification modeling", Comp. Mat. Sci. (2022) 111692

AdditiveFOAM is built on source code released by the OpenFOAM Foundation openfoam.org, which is available in public OpenFOAM repositories. The current supported version is OpenFOAM-10.

spack provides a simple way to install AdditiveFOAM. spack develop is currently required: spack install additivefoam

Alternatively, a Docker container with pre-built OpenFOAM-10 can be used:

docker pull openfoam/openfoam10-paraview510
docker run -it openfoam/openfoam10-paraview510

or instead OpenFOAM-10 can be compiled from source code following the steps provided by the OpenFOAM Foundation Documentation.

Once OpenFOAM-10 is available on your system, perform the following steps:

1. Clone the AdditiveFOAM repository into the OpenFOAM project installation directory WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR:

   cd $WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR
   git clone https://github.com/ORNL/AdditiveFOAM.git

   If git is not available on your system (in the case of the OpenFOAM docker container) you can instead use:

   wget https://github.com/ORNL/AdditiveFOAM/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz
   mkdir AdditiveFOAM
   tar xzvf main.tar.gz -C AdditiveFOAM --strip-components=1

2. Build the movingHeatSource library and the additiveFoam executable:

   cd $WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR/AdditiveFOAM/applications/solvers/additiveFoam/movingHeatSource
   wmake libso
   cd $WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR/AdditiveFOAM/applications/solvers/additiveFoam
   wmake

To run an AdditiveFOAM simulation, it is recommended to perform the following steps:

1. Prepare the case directory structure using a provided template:

   mkdir -p $FOAM_RUN/additivefoam
   cd $FOAM_RUN/additivefoam
   cp -r $WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR/AdditiveFOAM/tutorials/AMB2018-02-B userCase
   cd userCase

2. Modify the necessary input files according to your simulation requirements. These files include:

   • constant/: Contains configuration and settings that define geometric and material conditions, including:

     • transportProperties: Sets the transport properties of the material. The thermal conductivity kappa and specific heat Cp are given as temperature dependent second-order polynomials for each phase in the material.

       The available phases are:

       • solid
       • liquid
       • powder

       The remaining properties are all assumed constant throughout the simulation.

     • heatSourceDict: Defines number, types, and paths of moving heat sources in the simulation.

       The available heat sources are:

       • superGaussian
       • modifiedSuperGaussian

       The available absorption models are:

       • constant
       • Kelly

       Each heat source model has the ability to be update the depth of the heat source for keyhole modeling, by setting the transient flag to True and defining an isoValue to track the depth of an isotherm contained within the heat source radius. An example of this usage is provided in the multiBeam tutorial.

   • 0/: Contains the initial fields. The available fields are provided in the files:

     • T: temperature
     • U: velocity
     • p_rgh: reduced pressure
     • alpha.solid: solid volume fraction
     • alpha.powder: powder volume fraction

   • system/: Contains simulation configuration files.

     • controlDict: Set simulation time settings and numerical parameters.
     • fvSchemes: Set the discretization schemes used to solve the governing equations
     • fvSolution: Set solution algorithms and convergence criterias. Note: fluid flow can be turned off by setting nOuterCorrectors to 0 in the PIMPLE dictionary.

3. Run the simulation: An example run script which creates a mesh, decomposes the mesh across multiple processors, and runs the AdditiveFOAM case in parallel using MPI is provided in tutorial Allrun script.

4. Visualize and post-process the results using ParaView

   touch case.foam
   paraview case.foam

AdditiveFOAM supports a scan path file format that decomposes the laser path into segments that are either a) line sources or b) point sources.

One feature of AdditiveFOAM is its ability to export thermal information to ExaCA, a cellular automata (CA) code for grain growth under additive manufacturing conditions. This feature is enabled using the execute flag in the constant/foamToExaCADict file. The solidification conditions at the specified isotherm is tracked in the represenative volume element defined by box and a resolution defined by dx. It is recommended to track the liquidus isotherm. Users should be warned that this interpolation may cause a significant load-balancing issues if the resolution of the ExaCA data is much finer than that of the AdditiveFOAM mesh, and therefore, this feature should be used selectively.

AdditiveFOAM is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file LICENSE in this directory or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/, for a description of the GNU General Public License terms under which you can copy the files.

For any questions, issues, or suggestions regarding AdditiveFOAM, you can reach out to the project maintainers through the GitHub repository's issue tracker or by contacting the development team.

We encourage you to contribute to AdditiveFOAM! Please check the guidelines on how to do so.

We appreciate your interest in AdditiveFOAM and look forward to your contributions!