CSIRO to hold 'Digital Twin' symposium for metal AM

The CSIRO will be holding a one-day symposium in Melbourne on 4 July titled the ‘Towards a True Digital Twin’ Symposium. The symposium will bring together international leaders to answer critical questions, including:

• What will such a digital twin look like?
• What are our current capabilities?
• What do we need to do to bridge the gap?
   

Metallic additive manufacturing involves layer-by-layer production of components, typically by melting metal powders using a laser or electron beam. Additive manufacturing has many attractive features, eg, custom-designed components can be produced with geometries not achievable by conventional methods. However, for AM to reach its full potential, a realistic virtual representation of the complete process is required. Such a ‘digital twin’ will accelerate process design and optimisation, and form a key part of process certification and component qualification.

The development of a digital twin presents huge challenges. Not only do accurate and fast computational sub-models of the complex physical and metallurgical processes involved (powder-bed raking, heat transfer and flow in the molten pool, microstructure formation, residual stress development) have to be produced and validated, but they have to be tightly integrated. This is a critical obstacle since the sub-models use different computational approaches and treat vastly different scales, from powder (~50 micrometres) to part (up to metres).

The symposium will bring together leading experts in a diverse range of relevant fields including metallic additive manufacturing, computational modelling, multiscale techniques, structure-property relations, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and digital twins of industrial processes.

Through keynote lectures, poster presentations and facilitated discussion sessions, the symposium aims to:

• define the requirements for a true digital twin of the additive manufacturing process;
• identify the main barriers to developing such software, including those involved in linking sub-models across scales;
• explore the physical, metallurgical and computational approaches to overcome these barriers;
• set out a roadmap for the development of a digital twin.
   

Keynote speakers include:

• Tarasankar DebRoy, Penn State University, USA
• Dongdong Gu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
• Leila Ladani, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
• Ibo Matthews, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
• Chris Vains, Siemens Australia
   

The symposium is directed towards researchers, managers, students and others from academia, government and industry.

Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to attend; the symposium will include a networking session, and a large number of travel grants for early-career researchers are being offered.

The ‘Digital Twin’ symposium will follow APICAM 2019 (Asia-Pacific International Conference on Additive Manufacturing), to be held in Melbourne from 31 June to 3 July.

The cost is $150 for full registration and $75 for early-career researchers. The symposium will be held at the Woodward Conference Centre, Main lecture room, 10th floor, University of Melbourne Law School (Building 106), Carlton.

The program can be found at https://digitaltwin.aimfuturescience.com/program, and registration here.

Image: CSIRO’s Lab 22.