SOFTWARE & SIMULATION FEATURE sponsored by
WORDS: LAURA GRIFFITHS
A
dditive manufacturing (AM) technology is outpacing our current software toolset. At least that is the take from one New York-based software developer nTopology, with 30.7 million USD in funding to do something about it. “People have been working in AM for many years and they’ve had these dreams of things that they’ve wanted to create. It’s not easy to do that with the tools that they have today,” Blake Perez, Application Engineer at nTopology tells TCT during a meeting at last year’s TCT Show. It’s a good introduction as to why the company’s computational modelling platform exists today, described by Perez as “a modelling tool and engineering knowledge-capture tool for high-performance geometry.” The comments were made back in September when the company made its debut at the Birmingham event and scooped up a TCT Award for its nTop Platform. Co-founded by Grey Schroy and CEO Bradley Rothenberg, nTopology first arrived on the AM scene in 2015 with its Element lattice design software. With a powerful modelling kernel on their hands, the team started looking at ways in which the software could be expanded to open up more applications. After working with a number of pilot customers, nTop Platform was born. Formally launched last May, nTop Platform offers a number of toolkits for lightweighting, topology optimisation, additive manufacturing, design analysis and architected materials for users in the aerospace and defense, automotive, medical and industrial design sectors; the company already counts the likes of Lockheed Martin amongst early users. Two months on from that TCT Award win, nTopology announced the next iteration, nTop Platform 2.0, with updated toolkits and the opportunity for users to create their own workflows.
MAKE THE WORK FLOW
nTop Platform has been designed to handle complex geometries in a repeatable way. Users can design engineering workflows which can be deployed to a whole product family or organisation to speed up the design-tomanufacturing process. Geometries can be modelled directly in the software or design data can be imported from most major CAD tools, optimised, latticed, sliced and supported within a single platform, holding the user's hand through pre-installed data sets or allowing users to build
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TOPOLOGY OPTIMISATION OF AN AEROSPACE BRACKET
on top of those and input their own IP. “That’s why we call it a Platform,” says Perez. “Typically, the workflow is, you have this very talented engineer who takes analysis results data, looks at it, has some intuition about how that gets applied to the geometry and it’s back and forth, that person has to be in the middle,” Perez says of the current workflow. “Now you can set up these loops where that happens automatically.” The typical design-to-manufacturing workflow is a long one with many components to contend with. Designers and engineers are required to switch between multiple pieces of software in order to get a design to the point of manufacture and for every design iteration, those many steps have to be carried out all over again. That’s where repeatable workflows come in. “The more you enable your team to iterate, make design changes, learn from failures, the better your outcome is, we all know that,” Perez says. “We kind of tied all these processes together, bringing in the simulation data, bringing in your existing geometry, the optimisation, and putting that all together in a single tool. So now you can say, okay I’ve learned from my part, I need to make this design change and go back and make it. Your part rebuilds and then you can just print right way, you don’t have to worry about costing your company man hours in making that design change.”
