Manufacturers interested in additive manufacturing for production parts face the same problem as those using subtractive manufacturing: the process stalls once the design moves to development.

In the video above, we look at how companies like Materialise are creating software suites to optimize additive manufacturing workflows.

“For the last 20 years, Materialise has been building the software backbone for additive manufacturing,” explained Bryan Crutchfield, VP and general manager at Materialise North America. “And, as we’re doing that, we’re building collaborations between all of the CAD vendors and all of the machine OEMs in order to create that digital thread that everyone will work in with 3D printing.”

“Our Magics 3D print suite addresses a lot of the concerns that go along with taking something from CAD, making it printable, doing hollowing, serialization, texturing and so on and delivering it to the machine in a way that it can be processed in a very fine way,” Crutchfield added. “We’re recording all of the build data into an archive, so manufacturers have all the traceability for product reliability and regulations.”

Manufacturers who have adopted 3D printing were sold on the idea that using it was not an iterative process. But it can be quite the opposite: highly iterative and experimental – which creates addition expenses. However, using advanced software, design engineers can bring iterative steps into the simulation process, cutting costs and saving time.

“We recently released Materialise Inspector, which is geared towards simulating what’s going to happen inside your 3D printing process,” Crutchfield explained.

“We want to look at part geometry, how you orientate the part, looking at things like energy density maps for laser powder bed systems and identifying problems, like if you’ll overheat the material or not, so that engineers and designers can proactively tweak projects to optimize what they’ll get in serial production. The system will also allow for feedback loops, so you can record image data or thermal data inside of the system, which will sort through images automatically and flag those that are of concern.”

For more information about Materialise Magics and Inspector, visit the Materialise website.