The design of additive manufacturing processes, especially for batch production in industrial practice, is of high importance for the propagation of new additive manufacturing technology. Manual redesign procedures of the additive manufactured parts based on discrete measurement data or numerical meshes are error prone and hardly automatable. To achieve the required final accuracy of the parts, often, various iterations are necessary. To address these issues, a data-driven geometrical compensation approach is proposed that adapts concepts from forming technology. The measurement information of a first calibration cycle of manufactured parts is the basis of the approach. Through non-rigid transformations of the part geometry, a new shape for the subsequent additive manufacturing process was derived in a systematic way. Based on a purely geometrical approach, the systematic portion of part deviations can be compensated. The proposed concept is presented first and was applied to a sample fin-shaped part. The deviation data of three manufacturing cycles was utilised for validation and verification.

Inorganically-bound core materials are used in foundries in high quantities. However, there is no validated mechanical failure criterion, which allows performing finite-element calculations on the core geometries, yet. With finite-element simulations, the cores could be optimised for various production processes from robotic core handling to the decoring process after the casting. To identify a failure criterion, we propose testing methods, that enable us to investigate the fracture behaviour of inorganically-bound core materials. These novel testing methods induce multiple bi-axial stress states into the specimens and are developed for cohesive frictional materials in general and for sand cores in particular. This allows validating failure criteria in principal stress space. We found that a Mohr-Coulomb model describes the fracture of inorganic core materials in a plane stress state quite accurately and adapted it to a failure criterion, which combines the Mohr-Coulomb model with the Weakest-Link theory in one consistent mechanical material model. This novel material model has been successfully utilised to predict the fracture force of a Brazilian test. This prediction is based on the stress fields of a finite element method (FEM) calculation.

Inorganically-bound sand cores are used in many light-metal foundries to form cavities in the cast part, which cannot be realised by the mould itself. To enable FEM simulations with core materials, their mechanical properties have to be measured. In this article, we adapt methods to determine the Young’s and shear modulus, the Poisson ratio and the fracture strain of sand cores. This allows us to fully parametrise an ideal brittle FEM model. We found that the Young’s and shear modulus can be obtained acoustically via the impulse excitation technique. The fracture strain was measured with a high-speed camera and a digital image correlation algorithm.