Aibuild has launched FETS, a finite element thermomechanical simulation tool for additive manufacturing that the company says runs up to 10,000 times faster than any comparable solution on the market. The tool supports five AM processes: Directed Energy Deposition, Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing, Friction Stir Additive Manufacturing, Fused Granulate Fabrication, and Fused Filament Fabrication, covering both metals and thermoplastics. During the build process, FETS covers six output types: thermal distribution, thermomechanical behavior, distortion, residual stress, interlayer bonding quality including poor adhesion and sagging detection, and crack prediction from simulated stress.
What's new here is the delivery model. FETS runs on cloud GPU compute, removing the need for on-premises HPC hardware. A full finite element analysis simulation of a metal AM build previously required an HPC cluster costing upwards of $1.2 million. FETS integrates directly into the CAM environment and generates its finite element mesh automatically from toolpath data, removing the need to export files or maintain a separate simulation workflow. Aibuild designed the tool to require no specialist FEA knowledge, meaning an ordinary AM machine operator can run it rather than a dedicated simulation engineer.
The speed claim comes with independent verification. NIAR, the National Institute for Aviation Research, tested FETS on thick-wall and thin-wall geometries made from 17-4PH stainless steel using a Wire Arc DED system built around Fronius and ABB hardware. The thick-wall simulation completed in two hours and 39 minutes, the thin-wall in 54 minutes. Mean prediction error for interlayer temperature came in at 3.2 percent, with a maximum of 6.37 percent, accuracy comparable to traditional FEA tools that require days of setup and specialist hardware. Jeswin J. Chankaramangalam, Program Director at NIAR, noted that thermal control has been one of the biggest obstacles holding back metal AM at industrial scale.
NIAR is working to qualify Wire Arc DED for specific aerospace applications where FETS will serve as the process control tool, covering components such as six-meter wing ribs and titanium landing gear assemblies. Aerospace forging lead times currently run from 12 to 18 months. Wire Arc DED with validated thermal control can bring that to two to four weeks while reducing material waste by 70 percent. Aibuild is also working on integrating Fourier Neural Operator models from NVIDIA's PhysicsNeMo platform, targeting a simulation time of five minutes, which would represent a 99.9 percent reduction compared to traditional tools.
