A universal material template for multiscale design and modeling of additive manufacturing processes

In this paper, a universal material template is developed to digitally describe the materials with spatially distributed compositions and microstructures for multiscale design and modeling of additive manufacturing processes. The developed template is organized in the form of a multi-level hierarchical structure. The root node of a material template contains four sub-nodes. They are “descriptors list”, “constituent materials”, “position information” and “primitive information”. The format of each sub-node has been given in this paper to help users to establish a standardized description of microstructures of materials. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed template, the microstructures of two different types of commonly used materials in additive manufacturing processes are reconstructed from the pre-defined material templates. The results show the developed material template can accurately and precisely control the microstructures of materials. Based on the developed material template, the multiscale heterogeneous modeling method can be developed in the future.