A CFD simulation platform for surface finishing processes in advanced manufacturing

Products created by additive manufacturing often have surface imperfections that require post-processing operations to remove extraneous material in order to meet design specifications. The usage of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to predict material removal rates of components, allows practitioners to optimize the setup and usage of post-processing equipment. However, those without in-depth knowledge of CFD or the related specialized software, require an easy-to-use and cost-effective application to manage the computational workflow. The two specific surface finishing applications investigated here, are, abrasive flow machining (AFM) and robotic stream finishing (RSF). In order to satisfy user requirements, a modular, threaded, fault-tolerant and object-oriented project management application, written with the Python programming language and PyQt6 framework, has been developed to conduct surface finishing-related CFD simulations using OpenFOAM®. The advantages of the proposed software are: 1) the modern PyQt6 framework is used to develop a cross-platform and user-friendly application which employs the model-view class architectural paradigm for data management and its display, 2) step-by-step interactive project workflows have been tailored specifically for AFM and RSF simulations, 3) the developed steady-state viscoelastic flow solver for AFM and continuum-based steady-state dense granular flow solver for RSF, offer advantages over those provided by OpenFOAM® and 4) simulation results have been corroborated by experimental data to assess the improved accuracy of material removal prediction of the current software when compared to other commercial applications.