As it was announced in the call, the metal-based additive process (SLM) as innovative manufacturing technique should be used for the environment-friendly production of components and modules of the advanced GTF demonstrator and therefore to meet the requirements of the SAGE 4 concerning a fuel burn reduction combined with a decrease in noise emission. For compliance with the high requirements of the aerospace industry, concerning the process stability and part quality of the SLM process, numerous rigs testing are required to integrate the manufactured parts in a SAGE 4 full engine. As described in the call, high resource consumption is necessary if the process qualification is performed directly at the manufacturing system. This includes the increased material usage, the personnel deployment and a decreased system availability. A significant reduction of the production efficiency is the result and is in contrast to the requirements of SAGE 4.

Hence, the main objective of this proposal was to develop a simulation tool that is based on an integrated finite element model by considering the material properties and process parameters of the manufacturing process for a realistic mapping of aerospace parts of the GTF. Thus, for every part that had to be manufactured, the virtual process qualification of SLM increases the quality objectives “high density", “reduced distortion and residual stresses” and “specified microstructure characteristics”. Due to the development of user-specific optimisation methods that were based on the simulation results, a significant economisation of resources for the manufacturing process was reached within the project work and thereby the requirements of the SAGE4 with regard to the advanced GTF demonstrator was fulfilled.