Dr. Wentao Yan has been an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2018. Supported by multi-million dollar grants, his research group with 20+ students focus on multi-scale multi-physics modeling, experimental investigation and data analysis of additive manufacturing. His team is the biggest winner in the 2022 NIST AM-Bench Simulation Challenges by winning 9 awards in the total 25 tests (totally 40 awards were presented). He has published ~ 100 papers on flagship journals, such as Nature Communications, Acta Materialia, JMPS and CMAME, and has delivered more than 70 invited talks on international conferences and prestigious universities. 20 of his former students have got faculty positions, including all the 10 former postdocs. Before joining NUS, Dr. Yan was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and also a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA. He received his Ph.D. degree jointly at Tsinghua University, Beijing and Northwestern University, USA. He got his Bachelor degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing in 2012.

Topic title:

High-fidelity modeling of multi-material additive manufacturing: from micro-/nano-particle reinforced composites to in-situ alloying

Abstract:

Additive manufacturing possesses promising capabilities of fabricating new materials by mixing multi-material powders and manipulating chemical compositions. In this talk, we will present our latest work on high-fidelity modeling of the complex additive manufacturing process: from powder spreading to melting. To evaluate the mixture uniformity of the powder layer/stream, we employ the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element method (DEM) coupling method to simulate the powder spreading/blowing processes of mixed multi-material powders. To thoroughly understand the material composition distribution in the melting procedure, we develop a multi-physics thermal-fluid flow model to simulate the different melting/flow/solidification behaviors of different powders as well as the interactions between solid powders and molten pool. Various scenarios are simulated from micro-/nano-particle reinforced composites to in-situ alloying for new materials. All these models are validated against experiments, and show appealing potentials to provide guidance for additive manufacturing of mixed powders.