Sintering process simulations in Mechanical are performed using the Sintering Process Add-on, which simplifies the setup of the sintering material model. An Additive Suite license is required to use the add-on.
Loading the Sintering Process Add-on
Click the Add-ons tab to show the available Mechanical add-ons. Simply click the Sintering Process button (in the Additive Manufacturing group) to load the Sintering Process Add-on. The button is shaded blue when the add-on is loaded.
When loaded, the Sintering Process Add-on introduces two features within the Mechanical UI:
Sintering Process tab and ribbon: Click the Sintering Process tab to see the custom ribbon, which provides a way to access the wizard as well as to manually introduce thermal load and result objects into the project tree.
Sintering Process Wizard: Click the Open Wizard button from the custom ribbon to access the Sintering Process Wizard. The wizard provides an easy, step-by-step guide to set up the material model, boundary conditions, thermal loads, and result objects for a simple sintering process simulation. The wizard also modifies certain solver settings for solving stability. Upon completing the wizard, the simulation is ready to solve.
We strongly recommend you use the Sintering Process Wizard.
Use High Performance Computing
A sintering simulation can be very compute intensive. Consider taking advantage of high performance computing using an Ansys HPC license to allow more than four cores.