Catholic University of Leuven

Identification of Additive Manufactured components – KU Leuven

Customer: KU Leuven
Division: Mechanical Engineering Dpt
Contact person: David Moens
Position: Professor – Head of research group

The University of Leuven’s Engineering department works with MatchID in most of its engineering consulting activities.

These consulting activities are focused mostly on reliability studies of mechanical designs: additive manufacturing processes have a certain variation in composition, and thereby a variation in mechanical material properties.

This process induced uncertainty cannot be identified by classical tests, as these only yield global (cq homogenized) material properties across a specimen.

In order to identify and quantify the effects of heating history on local mechanical behaviour other tools are needed.

By combining MatchID’s Virtual Fields Method (VFM) module and Stereo-DIC platform, KU Leuven succeeds in precisely identifying strain variations throughout components.

This gives an increased control of material properties, an ability to decrease incidental safety margins.

The resulting benefits being optimised designs and build lay-outs for 3D-printed elements, giving the final components an overall improved reliability.

KU Leuven decided to use MatchID because of the user friendliness of the platform, the availability of extensive training materials, and the dedicated and very experienced support people.

“MatchID opened up the world of DIC for us, such that it now an indispensable part of our experimental activities.” says Prof David Moens of KU Leuven.

KU Leuven has been using MatchID since 2015, and currently implements the 2018.1 version of the Stereo DIC engine in combination with the VFM module.