What's New in FLOW-3D AM 2025R1
FLOW-3D AM 2025R1 represents a breakthrough in additive manufacturing simulation for accelerated material and technology commercialization. This powerful new release brings a new, fully integrated simulation platform for laser-based additive manufacturing processes including powder bed fusion and directed energy deposition, enabling engineers to deliver cutting edge manufactured products to the market more quickly and at less cost.
Workflow Improvements
New unified user interface
FLOW-3D AM 2025R1 seamlessly integrates the functionality of FLOW-3D, FLOW-3D WELD and FLOW-3D DEM, delivering unprecedented ease-of-use. Users have the ability to enable all relevant physics models within a single, streamlined interface as well as define all required material properties for either single or dual alloy applications.
New process templates
New pre-loaded templates in FLOW-3D AM 2025R1 make complex simulation setup easier than ever. Users can start with one of three new templates: powder operations, laser melting and laser melting with active particles. Users can then effortlessly move between different steps in their process simulations, maintaining complete project continuity within FLOW-3D AM .
Improved restart workflows
All particle data, material and fluid properties can now be directly translated into initial fluid regions for restart simulations. Users can also visualize particle beds generated from a previous powder bed laying simulation while setting up a laser melting simulation.
Users can also switch between templates on restart simulations, allowing for seamless transitions between processes such as powder bed laying and laser melting.
Dedicated FLOW-3D AM node in FLOW-3D (x)
In FLOW-3D (x), the addition of a dedicated FLOW-3D AM node enables parametric studies and optimization routines that can otherwise be time consuming to configure. Users can set up workflows to:
- Streamline model validation
- Run design of experiments (DOE)
- Optimize laser and process parameters
- Simulate multilayer scenarios
What’s more, using FLOW-3D (x) engineers can create customized workflows based on simulation objectives, making it even easier to identify optimal process parameters and manufacturing conditions. This powerful approach accelerates development cycles and enables comprehensive design space exploration, sensitivity analyses, and process optimization with minimal manual intervention.
Simulation results from a parameter matrix for a laser melting simulation, run automatically with a single input file in FLOW-3D (x). Validation data courtesy Gong et. al [source: Haijun Gong, et al. Melt Pool Characterization for Selective Laser Melting of Ti-6Al-4V Pre-alloyed Powder (2014)]
Performance and Scaling improvements
With this release, FLOW-3D AM 2025R1 brings support for high performance computing (HPC) platforms, accelerating simulating throughput. Harnessing the advanced OpenMP – MPI capabilities of our core solver, AM simulations on HPC platforms are now up to ~9x faster as compared to standard workstation configurations. Additive manufacturing professionals can accelerate time to market for critical AM applications by leveraging faster simulation runtimes.
Improved reflection model
Energy reflections from the free surface are important to consider, especially when simulating the keyhole regime. The improved reflection model in FLOW-3D AM provides a more accurate representation of laser reflections.
Improved heat source integration
The upgraded heat source definition options allow users to define complex laser paths such as spiral and skew lines with greater precision. Additional controls allow the transfer of heat source properties for multi-source simulations, saving time and reducing the chance for errors.
Particle-particle interactions
The newly integrated DEM capabilities in FLOW-3D AM are now natively available within the particle widget and supported across multiple particle classes. The DEM model is parallelized and compatible with high performance computing (HPC) platforms.
FLOW-3D AM support in FLOW-3D POST
The new, pre-configured objects for fluids, melt regions, heat sources, reflections and particles make visualization and analysis of FLOW-3D AM simulations a breeze. Annotations of commonly used outputs are automatically available upon opening the results file in FLOW-3D POST, accelerating postprocessing workflows.
