ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

Additive manufacturing / 3D printing

We have been providing cost-effective and easy to use geometry clean-up tools for rapid prototyping and 3D printing applications for many years. However, final part production from additive manufacturing is now also expanding fast. Since 2013, additively produced parts have grown from almost zero to over 50% of the market, with particularly strong growth in metal-based printing processes.

Primary advantages of additive manufacturing for final parts are reduction of tooling, flexible and lower quantity production, localised manufacture, reduced inventory and scope to improve final product performance through freedom to manufacture complicated geometries.

Optimised product design made possible by additive manufacturing includes light-weighting through internal lattice structures, fewer parts within an assembly and better thermal performance of tooling for other production processes, such as the incorporation of conformal cooling channels.

We have developed capabilities to meet these opportunities, supplying leading software and services to help industries overcome current challenges such as quality assurance, cost reduction, conservatism and speed and throughput. We have successfully addressed similar challenges over the past decades within injection moulding, sheet and bulk metal forming and machining processes.

The most comprehensive, capable and accessible set of Additive Manufacturing

We help companies implement the appropriate tools in-house for their specific additive/3D printing design and manufacturing requirements, drawing upon our extensive resources in process simulation training and technical support.

These tools address the major steps within the additive design process, from editing and preparing STL files, rapidly undertaking geometry changes, optimising topology and validating structural and thermal performance, through to simulation of the manufacturing operations, including microstructural investigations.