Boeing

Metal AM Finishing Fluid Flow Modeling

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is quickly transforming industrial manufacturing with the ability to produce high strength, low weight parts with intricate designs that are too complex to manufacture by conventional methods. However, the finishing/smoothing of parts remains one of the biggest challenges for enabling full and affordable implementation of AM. This student team worked to create a model that accounts for reaction kinetics, gas production, and gas and fluid flow and how it interacts with intricate part shape to design an optimal chemical processing configuration on internal surfaces, including the effects on the local metal removal rate on a complex geometry part. This was validated with chemical milling an aluminum or stainless steel part.