DEVELOP3D May 2021 by X3DMEDIA

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TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

MAY 2021 | £6 | € 7 | $10 | DEVELOP3D.COM

AUDIO DESIGN ISSUE INS I THE DE J PRE COM BL PA PA

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Cr eo 8hel psyou des i gn bet t er pr oduct sf as t er .Yourt eam wi l l appr eci at et he enhancement s t o us abi l i t yand pr oduct i vi t y, wi t h new t ool sf orModel Bas ed Def i ni t i on ( MBD) ,addi t i ve and s ubt r act i ve manuf act ur i ng. And Cr eo 8cont i nuest o bui l d upon new s i mul at i on and gener at i ve des i gn capabi l i t i es . LEARN MOREAT pt c. com/pr oduct s /cr eo/what s new

WELCOME EDITORIAL Editor-in-Chief Al Dean al@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 541 Managing Editor Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312 Digital Media Editor Stephen Holmes stephen@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3384 5297 Consulting Editor Jessica Twentyman jtwentyman@gmail.com +44 (0)20 7913 0919 Consulting Editor Martyn Day martyn@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)7525 701 542

DESIGN/PRODUCTION Design/Production Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7312

ADVERTISING Group Media Director Tony Baksh tony@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7313 Deputy Advertising Manager Steve King steve@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7314 US Sales Director Denise Greaves denise@x3dmedia.com +1 857 400 7713

SUBSCRIPTIONS Circulation Manager Alan Cleveland alan@x3dmedia.com +44 (0)20 3355 7311

ACCOUNTS Accounts Manager Charlotte Taibi charlotte@x3dmedia.com Financial Controller Samantha Todescato-Rutland sam@chalfen.com

ay is looming as I write this letter. Deceptively sunny weather has me tempted to put on shorts, knowing full well that my over-confident wardrobe choice will soon see me shivering in a bitter wind. Such is life. But the good news is that, on this island at least, there seems to be some respite from the virus. Things may even be returning to a state vaguely resembling ‘normal’. I overheard the kids who work in my local Co-op giddily discussing how they got hammered this past weekend (presumably on blue WKD or whatever they drink these days), made some poor life choices and were paying the price. It’s good to see the youths being themselves. It’s how things should be. This month’s issue focuses on the design and engineering of audio products. I have to say, when it comes to this subject, I’m torn. Part of me would love to have the full stack of separates that denotes the fully fledged hi-fi nerd, all matched and ready to create some noise. My sensible side reminds me that my hearing is half shot and most of my record collection is over 30 years old. The main reason I still enjoy dragging a needle across a chunk of plastic is that it’s good for the joints to have to get up and turn a record over every half-hour. You can stick your Pomodoro techniques and your focus timer apps. Give me a crapped-out turntable and a copy of ‘Masters of Reality’ or ‘Sunday at the Village Vanguard’. That said, Stephen has done an amazing job of talking to a range of folks from the audio product industry. Some are chasing the best sounds for studio engineers and home audiophiles alike. Others are focusing on mass volume products (pun 100% intended), designed for people on the move who want to bring their music to their garden, their office or – god forbid – the back seat of the bus. As a last note, many of us have lost folks in the last year or so. Recently, word reached us that two good friends of DEVELOP3D had passed away, both well before their time. So to Roxie and Bruce, this one is for you. Rest in peace, my friends.

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Al Dean Editor-in-Chief, DEVELOP3D Magazine, @alistardean

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GET NEWS OF FUTURE GPU ANNOUNCEMENTS The advanced linework and visually rich imagery you see in your professional software is only possible because of the GPU you are using to display it. For today’s resource heavy software, a modern GPU can mean increased performance and processing power. At AMD we are accelerating this further, and we can’t wait to show you what we have been working on. Register now for news of the newest AMD graphics cards as they’re announced: amd.com/ProGPUsignup

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CONTENTS MAY 2021 ISSUE NO. 127

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NEWS Nvidia updates GPUs and showcases Omniverse at GTC event, Ansys launches new discrete element tool and Autodesk acquires PLM start-up Upchain FEATURES Comment: Erin McDermott on the serious business of play Comment: SJ gets spicy with topology optimisation Visual Design Guide: Wilson-Benesch GMT One Turntable COVER STORY JBL’s sound scientists at work Perfect playback: Designing for excellence at PMC Slicker fit: ACS Custom’s earpiece workflow Bass response: Airpulse firmly targets audiophiles Gold standard: Tectonic and Valve team up on VR sound

REVIEWS 42 PTC Creo 8 47 Shining 3D EinScan HX 3D Scanner 50 THE LAST WORD Faster processing in modern software could do more for our adoption of tools beyond simply speeding up our work, writes Al Dean 51 DEVELOP3D SERVICES

The wood used to produce this magazine comes from Forest Stewardship Council certified well-managed forests, controlled sources and/or recycled material

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COMING TO THE JUNE EDITION DEVELOP3D.COM/THE-D3D-30

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NEWS NVIDIA GTC: WHAT THE MASTER OF GPUS BROUGHT TO ITS ANNUAL EVENT » The wait for Nvidia's Omniverse visualisation and collaboration platform is almost over, the company said at its mid-April event, where it also unveiled a whole raft of new GPUs for desktop and mobile workstations, based on its 'Ampere' architecture

vidia GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is always an opportunity for the chipmaker to showcase some of its most recent products – even when its keynote address is delivered not from a stage, but from CEO Jensen Huang’s kitchen. At the mid-April event, the company announced that its visualisation-focused platform Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise will be available this summer. Omniverse harnesses the power of Nvidia RTX real-time tracing technology and Nvidia PhysX real-time physics engine, to enable global 3D design teams working across multiple CAD, BIM and viz tools to collaborate in real time in a shared virtual space. This can be via an RTX-accelerated desktop or mobile workstation; with a cloud workstation accessed via a PC, laptop or tablet; or through a VR headset using Nvidia CloudXR. “Omniverse lets us create and simulate shared virtual 3D worlds that obey the laws of physics,” said Huang. “Once connected, designers doing modelling, layout, shading, animation, lighting, special effects or rendering can collaborate to create a scene.” Rather than exchanging and iterating on massive files, designers, viz artists and reviewers can work simultaneously in their application of choice. Any changes made in one application instantly appear in others. This is made possible by Pixar’s USD (Universal Scene Description), an open framework for the interchange of 3D computer graphics data. Automaker BMW, for example, will be

using the Omniverse platform in its R&D activities. A virtual factory planning tool, based on Omniverse, integrates a range of planning data and applications and allows “real-time collaboration with unrestricted compatibility,” according to BMW, enabling it to map out in advance highly complex production systems. For workgroups of about 25 people, prices for Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise start at $1,800 per user, per annum, plus $25,000 for the Omniverse Nucleus server, which forms the backbone to the collaborative platform. For 500 people and above, the price of Nucleus Server goes up to $250,000. Also at GTC, Nvidia announced it has expanded its professional family of

desktop workstation GPUs, with the launch of two new Nvidia RTX cards based on its ‘Ampere’ architecture. The Nvidia RTX A4000 (16 GB) and the Nvidia RTX A5000 (24 GB) will join the flagship Nvidia RTX A6000 (48 GB). As with all ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX GPUs, the new models feature new RT Cores, Tensor Cores and CUDA cores – all of which can be used concurrently for ray tracing, shading and denoising tasks in RTX-enabled software such as Unreal Engine, Enscape, Autodesk VRED, Chaos Vantage and, of course, Nvidia Omniverse. Nvidia RTX GPUs can also be used with non-RTX software, including tools for 3D modelling, VR and AI. Both GPUs support PCIe Gen 4, which offers double the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 3, so data can move from CPU to GPU much quicker. The company is also addressing the mobile workstation market with four new ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX laptop GPUs: the Nvidia RTX A2000 laptop (4 GB); Nvidia RTX A3000 laptop (6 GB); Nvidia RTX A4000 laptop (8 GB); and Nvidia RTX A5000 laptop (16 GB). In addition, Nvidia continues to cater to users of 3D CAD tools that don’t necessarily need RTX ray tracing capabilities. It has launched two new entry-level laptop GPUs, the Nvidia T1200 and Nvidia T600, which are based on Nvidia’s previous-generation Turing architecture. Expect to find these in ultraslim mobile workstations. nvidia.com

(Above) Nvidia's visualisation-focused platform Omniverse will be available from this summer, the company has announced (Below) The BMW Group is working with Nvidia on planning highly complex manufacturing systems using the Omniverse platform

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NEWS

DYEMANSION TAKES ON THE BIG ADDITIVE VOLUME CHALLENGE

L’Oréal beautifies its prototyping with AMFG

eauty company L'Oréal has long embraced 3D printing and uses digital manufacturing techniques to reduce time to market for new products, bring added value to customers, and help keep factories running smoothly. It has adopted AMFG’s MES and workflow management software to help it in this mission. Prototyping remains L’Oréal's largest use case for 3D printing, with thousands of prototypes produced for its design teams at its 3DLab in Clichy, France. amfg.ai

dditive post-processing specialist DyeMansion has launched its next generation of products and is looking to solve one of the biggest hurdles to additive manufacturing becoming a volume production method – the post-processing of parts, whether that’s depowdering, colouring or surface finishing. DyeMansion has built itself a reputation for providing some pretty compelling technologies for those looking to push the additive envelope in terms of automating certain aspects of part products, particularly in the often-neglected polymer additive world. Products released by the company to date have generally focused on three areas: depowdering powder-based parts, surface finishing and colouring of parts.

While the company is continuing with separate machines for all of these processes, the release of the Powershot Dual Performance combines cleaning (read: depowdering) and surface finishing in a single machine. It’ll take the output from a system like an EOS P396 or HP Jet Fusion 4200 or 5200 and first carry out the cleaning of parts, recovering powder in a highly automated manner, then carrying out surfacing work. The rollout of the new Powershot Performance series will begin with selected pilot customers including 3DPRINTUK. Together, the two companies will develop the systems further. Orders for the DUAL version will be accepted from Q4 2021 on. The new generation of the classic Powershot C&S is already available. dyemansion.com | 3dprintuk.com

The DyeMansion Powershot Dual combines part cleaning and surface finishing in an integrated unit

nTopology releases nTopology 3.0 with GPU compute support & new learning tools

n its third major update to nTopology, the company is introducing GPU acceleration for seamless interactivity. By enabling this new opt-in feature (currently in beta), nTop users will enjoy an instant 10x to 100x performance boost to workflows that use complex field-driven geometry. As a company blog post explains: “Any CPU can evaluate an implicit equation in milliseconds. Yet, visualising a part with a complex lattice structure on your screen could take up to tens of seconds in previous versions of nTopology. That is (probably) faster than any other engineering design software in the market today, but it was still not quick enough. The short waiting time hindered the productivity of our engineering users and was a nuisance to creative design efforts.” nTopology can now take advantage of the benefits of GPU compute (on both Nvidia and AMD hardware)

TraceParts adds millions of parts to Onshape

raceParts has launched its native Onshape App, bringing “hundreds of millions” of free standard and suppliercertified 3D models to the 3D CAD system. Once they've added the TraceParts 3D Design Library app, available as a free subscription, designers can find millions of products from over 1,100 leading suppliers of mechanical, electrical, electronics, pneumatics and hydraulics parts, along with many other types of industrial components. traceparts.com | onshape.com

Mechdyne TGX boosts remote access

M to complete a specific set of functions in near-real time, including latticing, texturing, filleting, shelling, and other field-driven operations. Alongside other updates such as better integrated learning tools, it looks like nTopology 3 is advancing the state of the art. We'll be taking a closer look in the June 2021 issue of DEVELOP3D. ntopology.com

echdyne has updated its TGX remote desktop software, which is designed specifically for graphics-intensive applications such as CAD and real-time visualisation on multiple displays up to 4K resolution. New features in Mechdyne TGX include multi-monitor configuration support on all receiver platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS); an improved user interface for “intuitive set-up and connection” configurations; and automated and simplified access to frequently used controls. mechdyne.com

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ANSYS ROCKY: NEW DISCRETE ELEMENT MODELLING TOOLS

SSS and Ansys are working to improve discrete element modelling (DEM) workflows for quickly analysing and assessing particle movement. Interoperable with industry-leading Ansys flagship solvers, the new workflow, called Ansys Rocky, helps engineers “design highly reliable products, slash development times and win the race to market.” According to Ansys, nearly 70% of industrial products experience bulk granular material flows, where differentsized particles with complex shapes interact, potentially impacting a product’s efficiency or structural integrity. To overcome this difficult design challenge, engineers use DEM, coupled with structural and fluid analysis, to assess the flow behaviour of these granular particles early in the design phase. The new workflow is a robust 3D DEM solution for tackling particle movement design issues. It uses multiple GPUs simultaneously to analyse bulk material flow systems 20 to 90 times faster via high-fidelity, uncompromised massive particle models. Ansys Rocky is integrated with Ansys Fluent and Ansys Mechanical and swiftly simulates fully coupled fluid and structural systems’ bulk material movement and reaction to forces such as gravity and adhesion, ensuring new products are more reliable than ever. “We welcome the news of the agreement between Ansys and ESSS. As you can imagine, most products we design and manufacture involve particulate systems and are inherently multi-components and

multiphysics,” said Lei Zhao, R&D director at PepsiCo. “R&D and engineering teams at PepsiCo rely on Ansys Fluent to perform computational fluid dynamic analysis and Ansys Rocky to perform particle dynamic analysis to ensure product quality and optimise manufacturing processes. The results are a shorter product development cycle with less waste and more efficient processes that help meet the growing demand for healthier and more environmentally friendly products.” Ansys claims that unlike traditional DEM code, Ansys Rocky accurately models particles shapes, including arbitrary 3D shapes, 2D shells and flexible fibre, helping engineers deal with complex geometric design variations. ansys.com | esss.co

Ensuring quality of a pharmaceutical tablet coating process, using Ansys CFD and Ansys Rocky

Materialise has acquired an option to buy Link3D's additive workflow and manufacturing execution systems (MES) tech, as it looks to enable volume additive production. The move should accelerate Materialise’s strategy to offer cloud-based access to its software platform materialise.com

New VeroUltra White and VeroUltra Black materials are set to provide an important realism boost for prototyping projects using Stratasys colour 3D printing. The latest VeroUltra materials have been designed by Stratasys to simulate high-quality opaque plastic parts, even when they are very thin stratasys.com

through Ricoh 3D’s AM service bureau immediately. Ricoh 3D is the latest industry partner to join forces with Impossible Objects to drive its additive manufacturing technology forward, with others including BASF and Tiger Coatings. impossible-objects.com | ricoh.com

Z-PEI 1010 is a new thermally stable filament, compatible with Zortrax Endureal. Z-PEI 1010 has significantly higher rigidity than Z-PEI 9085, meaning components 3D-printed with Z-PEI 1010 tend to break rather than bend when exposed to critical stress levels and retain their exact dimensions zortrax.com

Evatronix has joined the Universal Robots ecosystem, with its Heavy Duty Optima 3D scanner now qualified as compatible with UR cobots. The result of the cooperation is a solution supporting the automation of 3D scanning for part quality control or reverse engineering evatronix.com universal-robots.com

Impossible Objects partners in Europe with Ricoh 3D mpossible Objects' 3D-printed composite parts are set to be available in Europe for the first time, following the announcement of a new partnership with Ricoh 3D. Impossible Objects’ proprietary CBAM technology is capable of producing parts faster than conventional FDM 3D printing, combining polymers like Nylon and PEEK with full-fibre carbon fibre and fibreglass sheets. The CBAM process can create strong and resilient fine or flat parts, compared with those built using chopped fibre formation and lamination between layers, which can cause parts to fall apart under force. Composites including Carbon Fibre PEEK and Carbon Fibre PA12 are available

ROUND UP

CBAM combines polymers like Nylon and PEEK with full-fibre carbon fibre and fibreglass sheets

AMD has completely redesigned the user interface of its Radeon Pro professional GPU driver. This now features a simplified design that lets users more easily adjust settings while effectively meeting workflow needs amd.com

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NEWS

AUTODESK TO ACQUIRE UPCHAIN FOR SAAS PLM

Desktop Metal qualifies 316L stainless

utodesk is to acquire Upchain, a provider of instant-on, cloudbased product lifecycle management (PLM) and product data management (PDM) solutions. The acquisition will enable Autodesk to deliver more value for users, company executives claim, by increasing collaboration across “a decentralised product value chain, regardless of CAD system.” Upchain isn’t a well-known outfit, but the skinny is that it has created a cloud platform that it claims “eliminates the boundaries of traditional PLM and PDM technologies, helping manufacturers manage complexity across teams by putting data at the centre of the product development process.” Autodesk will maintain Upchain’s open approach to data, supporting integration not only with solutions like Inventor, AutoCAD and Fusion 360, but also with other CAD systems commonly used in the manufacturing industry. “Resilience and collaboration have never been more critical for manufacturers as they confront the increasing complexity of developing new products. We’re committed to addressing those needs by offering the most robust end-to-end design and manufacturing platform in the cloud,” said Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost. Anagnost continued: “The convergence of data and processes is transforming the industry. By integrating Upchain with our existing offerings, Autodesk customers will be able to easily move data without barriers and will be empowered to unlock

esktop Metal has qualified the use of 316L stainless steel for its Production System platform, which uses single-pass jetting (SPJ) technology. Known for corrosion resistance and excellent mechanical properties at extreme temps, 316L stainless steel is well-suited for applications in the most demanding conditions, including marine environments, pharmaceutical processing, food preparation, and for medical devices and surgical tooling. desktopmetal.com

and harness valuable insights that can translate to fresh ideas and business success.” According to Scott Reese, Autodesk's executive VP of product development and manufacturing solutions: “The acquisition of Upchain is a big step toward meeting our customers where they are, removing the barriers to collaboration and bridging the gap between data management and process management technologies.” He continued: “Disruption has become a constant in the world of manufacturing. Being equipped with instant access to data across the product value chain gives companies the ability to remain agile and bring compelling products to market quickly and efficiently.” autodesk.com | upchain.com

Autodesk's CEO, Andrew Anagnost is bullish about Upchain as part of the manufacturing division's product lifecycle management offering

HP launches Z2 Tower G8 and HP Z2 SFF G8 workstations to coincide with Nvidia GPUs

P has updated its entry-level line of desktop workstations with the launch of the HP Z2 Small Form Factor G8 and Z2 Tower G8. The compact, tool-less access HP workstations feature new technology throughout. This includes the new ‘Rocket Lake’ 11th Gen Intel Core and Intel Xeon CPUs, new ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX GPUs and fast PCIe Gen 4 Samsung PM9A1 SSDs, which offer double the read/write performance of PCIe Gen 3 Samsung SSDs. HP says the Z entry desktop line-up also offers advanced security features, enabling enterprise IT departments to keep devices, data, and identities protected. The announcement of the new machines has been timed to coincide with the launch of the new ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX A4000 and RTX A5000 GPUs. Both Nvidia RTX GPUs can be configured in

New software strategy at Ultimaker

ltimaker has announced its new ecosystem, in which the company will package all its 3D printers with Ultimaker Essentials software, and launch two new software subscriptions for professionals. Ultimaker Professional and Ultimaker Excellence aim to help businesses “globally scale and professionalise 3D printing.” Ultimaker will certify Ecosystem products and services that have been tested with the platform. ultimaker.com

Siemens Energy adopts Siemens simulation tools

I the larger HP Z2 Tower G8. The AMD Radeon Pro W5500 and AMD Radeon Pro W5700 Graphics are also available as options, as are the Nvidia Quadro P400 and Nvidia T1000, which are more suited to entry-level CAD and BIM workflows. HP is also adding additional ‘Ampere’ Nvidia RTX graphics options to its performance desktop line. hp.com

n what might be seen as a rather nepotistic tie-up, Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced that Simcenter has been chosen as the core simulation technology for the Generation Division of Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy’s Generation Division has long partnered with Siemens Digital Industries Software for design and simulation and now, through its expanded use of the Simcenter portfolio, the company has adopted a new approach to simulation that it believes will reduce time to market and improve reliability. siemens.com

12 MAY 2021 DEVELOP3D.COM

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COMMENT

The importance of fun and play in skills development is often underestimated, but it can be an important gateway to career progression. Don’t feel guilty about your playtime – feel upgraded, says our columnist, Erin McDermott

re you up for some playtime? Or do you think you have too many serious adult career things to do? What if I told you playtime IS a thing that responsible grown-ups should do? Lately, I was confronted with several situations that prove how true this is. During Nvidia’s GTC 21 conference, I attended a session discussing the development involved in a particular autonomous drone race. Was it cool? Yes. Was it play? Yes! The winning team was grinning in a way I’ve not seen sober engineers emote before. Was it being watched like a hawk by recruiters and corporate leaders? You bet! It reminded me of an event I attended years ago, a DIY robocars race in Silicon Valley. These races were like the autonomous drone competitions, but with homemade (toy) cars. A local coworking space, Circuit Launch, was packed with several hundred giddy nerds. We sympathetically groaned in unison when a collision occurred on the track. Other times, we cheered for those cars that finished the race. But there was more going on. One attendee told me large corporations take a keen interest in these competitions. Even tech giants developing autonomous driving technology have a hard time finding engineers to poach who have many years of experience in this stuff. After all, which company would they steal them from? This application is only being developed right now, for the first time! My acquaintance also told me that although the progress in these fun races may seem limited, many of the techniques and algorithms developed will provide foundations for methods used in full-sized autonomous vehicles. These tinkerers may be having fun – but to others, what they do could deliver significant new advances.

EVERY DAY’S A SCHOOL DAY The same week that I watched the autonomous drone presentation, I was invited to weigh in on a high school mechatronics curriculum. It was for a class

taught by Jim ‘The STEAM Clown’ Burnam, the most badass mechatronics teacher on the planet. His kids leave with hands-on experience in applied physics, electronics development, programming, and most importantly, in building fire-breathing robots (depending on the year). I was going to suggest incorporating AI if at all possible in Jim’s jam-packed curriculum. As it turns out, he already has plans to do just that. The implications here are worth stopping to think about. Of course having experience in a thing is a great asset when trying to get a job doing that thing. Even better is having a real-world example of something you built to demonstrate your abilities. What’s more, Jim’s students leave with practical experience in an emerging technology where they must make intellectual leaps. That means some of these teenagers will actually be more knowledgeable than seasoned hardware engineers who have never had a job in autonomous widgets.

BUILD SKILLS THROUGH PLAY While these examples involve emerging technologies, play is important in all types of skill development. In fact, I was recently shocked to discover how much of an advantage play can bring! A big time-suck for me these days is editing promotional videos, so I was looking to outsource the work. I didn’t have high expectations for production quality. After all, most of my digital art and video editing experience I picked up for fun when I went on sabbatical years ago. Back then, I was considering a career change, so I experimented with artistic tools. In the years that passed, I actually got paid to produce videos, but never considered myself a cinematographer. It still seemed like play. So, in my search for a video editor, I primarily cared that they could highlight the relevant and not-boring parts. Editors tried to woo me with their years of experience and their fancy degrees. I replied with, “OK, but can you pick out great clips?” Some of them flat-out told me “No.”

Others auditioned with clips I paid them to create. Most of those were worthless and were thrown away. I tried to compliment these editors about the good things their fancy degrees enabled them to do robotically, but I also had to tell them: “So, this clip you picked. He said literally nothing in that clip. And, also, it was hard to watch the entire 60 seconds.” I was genuinely taken aback that my years of fooling around making videos gave me more competence than degree-holding filmmakers could offer. For these reasons, if your spouse complains that you spend too much time in the garage attempting to 3D print with strange or perhaps alarming materials, tell him or her that it’s career development! If you help your child with a technical school project, and put a little extra engineering pizazz into that thing, be sure to document your work and take photos. You’ll want those for your professional portfolio. And if you’re having fun tinkering with a new skill – don’t feel guilty, feel upgraded!

DIY robocars savagely tearing up the carpet-track at Circuit Launch – fun, but also serious business

GET IN TOUCH: Erin M. McDermott directs optical engineering at Spire Starter, helping hardware engineers who don’t know that things using light (cameras, LED illumination, laser processes and so on) need competent design, optimisation and tolerancing like the rest of their widget. She also runs OddEngineer.com, connecting manufacturers and startups with niche hardware engineering experts. Get in touch at spirestarter.com or @erinmmcdermott DEVELOP3D.COM MAY 2021 15

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COMMENT

Your additive design might be full of spice, but could it give your customer tummy trouble? Our columnist SJ writes on the importance of striking the right balance between creative flair and customer comfort

t would appear that I’ve grown a second head, sprouted horns and am covered in green scales, for all the open-mouthed gawking my customer is doing. I glance at the computer screen, filled from end to end with my DfAM work. It’s a dramatic swirl of topology optimised structures, supported by lattices that look nothing like conventional block supports. I swallow hard, feeling my imposter syndrome closing in, and ask: “What do you think?” He hesitates, his face paling. “Well… you’re the expert, SJ. It’s all up to you.” He chokes out the last part, sounding like he might really be sick. “Just looking at it… it doesn’t sit right with me. How do you know it’s going to work? Have you… ever… printed anything like this before?” Now, I imagine him clutching his stomach to fight off the reaction he’s having to my design. A design he’s clearly not finding easy to swallow. Oftentimes in AM, we’re pushing the very limits of design to explore new frontiers in terms of materials, performance, even the physics of the build chamber itself. Topology optimisation and generative design allow me to create the most efficient, shape-optimised, lightweight designs. So, if it’s a shape that wasn’t even manufacturable until this young technology came along, I can’t say with confidence that I know it’s going to work. I could easily tell I was not passing this engineer’s gut check. I see beautiful internal lattice structures – but the customer sees high risk, high costs, a potential need for redesign, and a slipping schedule. So, how do I win over my customer’s stomach (and his confidence) with my rather spicy style of design?



Disruptive is definitely a good way to describe the effect additive has on the experienced bowels of veteran engineers



TUMMY MEDICINE Additive is a disruptive technology. You see the slogan (annoyingly) stickered everywhere on LinkedIn, plastered over webinar screenshots, and slapped on the swelling tide of pamphlets in the mail from businesses looking to “fill your supply chain needs.” Disruptive is definitely a good way to describe the effect that additive has on the experienced bowels of veteran engineers. I’ve done DfAM for aerospace engineers who worked during the time of the Challenger mission and were still haunted by the literal life-and-death lessons learned. It’s no surprise they’re hesitant to adopt a technology that could produce a rocket in three months rather than three years. Everything in AM is new and foreign and outside of their regular routine, their comfort zone. I sense excitement in these engineers, but also fear. Topology optimisation is the spicy seasoning to additive design. The Sriracha sauce, if you will. But as much as I love my build plate with a bit of a kick to it, it won’t mean anything if it gives my customer a massive case of indigestion. I see the damage a lack of widespread education has on additive’s acceptance into organisations. There’s typically a push from young, hungry, go-getter engineers entering the workforce and another push from additive champions at the top of the organisational food chain. This creates an uncomfortable pressure on those in the middle, who have spent their entire careers creating parts by conventional means. They already have their superpower, their own secret sauce, and they don’t want to give that up to a technology that’s new, untried, and untested. I return to my desk, pull up my design, and start ticking through my redesign checklist. I put myself in the customer’s chair and try to see things from their perspective. Is part function still inherently obvious? Does the design make sense in terms of manufacturability? Did I add recognisable datums to the part for postmachining and clean-up? Is the powder escape plan functional? I pause at the last question on the list: Have I successfully conveyed the constraints of metal printing to the customer and how I’ve addressed those constraints in each modification to the original design? I definitely thought I did – but maybe I could have done it better?

FINALLY, RELIEF When I next met my customer, he relaxed a bit as he began to see shapes and features that he was more familiar with. For this second round, I pulled back on the optimisation feature, striking a balance between optimised design, the original part, and manufacturability. With his confidence growing, I explained the design changes I’d made and why each one was necessary to the AM process. Afterwards, he understood well enough to make his own design suggestions. Providing input and assistance – collaborating on the recipe together – brought down his unease. And I got the green light that this mildly spiced plate would pass with flying colors. Cue the outro music. As additive adoption grows and new design flavours present themselves, it’s easy to get carried away with the seasoning. Heavy spices like topology optimisation enable limitless complexity and bespoke workflows. The complicated umami of generative design provides an entire deck of solutions – all at once – letting us choose based on any number of factors, be it budget, material consumption, or performance. Advances in software present designers with unlimited options, but we mustn’t forget the plate we are making isn’t for us – it’s for our customers (and their sensitive stomachs). Additive design is about more than who can pack the most flavour onto a plate. It’s about having highly satisfied customers who remember their initial taste, how it made them feel, and would want to do it again.

GET IN TOUCH: SJ is a metal additive engineer aka THEE Hot Girl of Metal Printing. She currently works as a metal additive applications engineer providing AM solutions and #3dprinting of metal parts to help create a decarbonised world. Get in touch at @inconelle on twitter DEVELOP3D.COM MAY 2021 17

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VISUAL DESIGN GUIDE WILSON BENESCH GMT ONE TURNTABLE More than 20 years in development, the Wilson Benesch GMT One is the pinnacle of turntable design, with each component optimised to provide the most accurate, satisfying listening experience

DEDICATION TO SOUND Such is its dedication to achieving the upmost sound quality, Sheffieldbased Wilson Benesch has only released two turntable models since its inception in 1989

MICROADJUSTABLE TONEARM To get the best results from the stylus, the height of the tonearm is adjustable by remote control in 2.5-micron steps – about half the width of a red blood cell

DIRECT DRIVE FOR TORQUE The GMT’s patented direct-drive motor boasts immeasurable levels of torque ripple and speed fluctuation, while being extremely reliable, meaning the platter spins at exactly 33rpm, without error

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HIGH VALUE, LOW VOLUME Super high-value and low-volume production means that the team can use the very latest in highend materials and manufacturing, partnering with 13 universities across Europe and the UK on research projects

NYLON & CARBON FIBRE Markforged 3D printing using continuous carbon fibre and Nylon allows the creation of unique optimised tonearm bridges with an extreme stiffness-to-weight ratio, which naturally dampens any unwanted vibration

CARBON FIBRE TONEARM The tonearm is a 12-inch, singlepiece carbon fibre component, which makes it the world’s stiffest and most highly damped tonearm

PNEUMATIC ISOLATION SYSTEM The autonomous pneumatic isolation system is microprocessorcontrolled to isolate the turntable from minute vibrations

NEXT STEPS

The GMT One turntable is priced on application. Find out more at wilson-benesch.com

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SCIENTIS OF SOUN

The L-100 JBL 75th Anniversary speaker is a twist on a heritage design, created to celebrate the company milestone

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ISTS ND

COVER FEATURE

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COVER FEATURE

» Whether indoors or out, whether set to produce sounds that are exhilaratingly loud or mellow and intimate, every JBL product is designed to match the lifestyles of its users, as members of the company’s global design team tell Stephen Holmes

elaxing with friends in the park, cycling to work, or hiking in the wilderness, music is now fully mobile, thanks to devices capable of going anywhere, producing quality sounds and fitting every lifestyle. That’s the ethos behind JBL, a brand with a 75-year heritage of producing audio products. These range from professional equipment capable of wowing huge stadium crowds to small Bluetooth speakers for personal use. Ten years ago, JBL brought design in-house, creating its own global team to sharpen its focus on fast-paced, consumer-driven design. This team is based in five studios worldwide, with around 250 designers focusing variously on industrial design, user interface/experience (UI/UX), packaging, digital art and apps. The overall goal, according to Damian Mackiewicz, JBL’s vice president of industrial design, is to create a holistic JBL experience. In other words, it’s about delivering the same brand experience across all products, “so that everything that we infuse this brand with somehow makes sense for the consumer, so that it feels natural.” Bringing product design and development in-house immediately paid dividends for JBL. Products that would have required 36 to 48 months to reach the market could be delivered in 12 months, simply because major stakeholders in that process – product managers, marketing teams, designers and engineers – could regularly work things out around the same table. As part of the move in-house, two major R&D centres were set up: one for consumer products in Shenzhen, China; and another for JBL’s professional range in Los Angeles, US. Having an office in Shenzhen – an area renowned as a hotbed for parts development and manufacture – has also

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3 placed the JBL design at the heart of fast-paced electronics innovation. “In Shenzhen, we can just go to the factory and see what’s going on,” says Mackiewicz. “To see what’s wrong with the tool, or even sometimes realise that the way it’s assembled takes too much time. It’s solving problems live, as they are happening.”

BRAND EXPERIENCE Mackiewicz explains that many of JBL’s products evolve from executive management team meetings. Here, everyone from across the company’s development groups is allowed to present their ideas to senior company executives. “We have a ‘future experience team’ that is focusing on five years from now. The engineering team is focusing on the new technology that they see on the market. The designers are coming from the consumer side, analysing for example how the consumer is working today and what impact the pandemic is having on audio consumption.”

A big factor in deciding whether to take a concept further is how well it fits the brand’s overall personality. Parent company Harman International Industries has several big brand names in its portfolio. If a concept doesn’t fit for JBL, it might well be developed for another brand in the stable. In presentations, anything goes, says Mackiewicz. There’s a big focus on pushing new ideas to the next level, by bringing them to life in as realistic a way as possible. Typically, this is done via Keyshot renders, but increasingly, the team is also using Unity for animations and augmented reality-based demos that give a clearer idea of how the products will look and work in the real world. Other times, however, this process might be more last-minute, he says. “Sometimes an idea pops up the night before and you want to talk about it, so you do a little sketch!” As the in-house design team grew, it became apparent to Mackiewicz that it needed to standardise on specific design tools, “because almost every month, there’s a new tool coming out that everybody would like to use.”

1 ●

The 112-decibel Eon One Compact is small enough to carry in one hand, but its sound is big enough to fill a room 2 Physical ●

prototypes play a critical role in determining size, shape and weight balance of products 3 Concepts ●

for handles are 3D-printed for testing

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COVER FEATURE

‘‘ With

parametric tools, we can control every single opening on the speaker grille and change the scale, size, and particular shape of it – especially for the areas that need it for performance

’’

5 TOOLSET CONSIDERATIONS

5 With the JBL Clip, ●

designers took the small form factor Bluetooth speaker and looked at what else could be added to help users get more from it 6 Maintaining ●

the same brand experience across all products is critical

With that in mind, Rhino is the main CAD tool used across the design team at JBL. This suits the organic and freeform shapes of the company’s products, and the tool helps the team quickly explore 3D shapes that are far removed from the traditional black boxes of many audio brands. Rhino plug-ins such as Grasshopper are used to help design the speaker grilles that release the sound. Industrial design director Alexander Demin explains that, in the past, this was limited to a punching process with just one pattern. “Nowadays, with parametric tools, we can control every single opening on the speaker grille and change the scale, size and particular shape of it,” he says. That’s especially important when it comes to areas associated with performance and airflow. “At the same time, we can develop a very particular design signature on the speaker grille,” he adds. KeyShot is used to make the designs for hard parts as realistic as possible. Fabric simulation also has a role, with JBL using Marvellous Designer to achieve the real-world material drape, stretch and pattern sizing that cover many of its speakers. Product designers often work alongside animators in the same room, enabling them to communicate faster and bounce ideas off one another. “It helps to think about the story they

will tell,” Mackiewicz explains. He reckons it’s the perfect way of launching a product: “It all happens in parallel, it makes sense talking to each other. At the same time, the packaging team is thinking about how they can tell the story the best way, too. Everyone is working to make this story happen.”

OUTSIDE THE BOX When JBL designed its first line of portable speakers, the brief was loose: design a small, medium and large speaker. While most companies would take one design and scale it to make the design language consistent across the three sizes, Mackiewicz’s team had other ideas. “What we took as a challenge was if a speaker is small and very light, what else can you do with it?” he says. “We really tried to analyse what we could do with a lightweight speaker, and we came up with the idea to clip it to a backpack. So it’s outside of your bag, it’s easier to carry, and we were really analysing the use case of each product.” Colour plays an important role in distinguishing the products, although manufacturing limitations mean designers need to agree on around five colour choices. “So how can you build a product where you don’t have to think about the colour, a product that is changing its colour, based on whatever you feel like in the morning? How does it adapt to you?” asks Mackiewicz. As a way around this, the team developed Pulse, a compact speaker with a case of colour-changing LED lights. These can be adjusted to match the user’s mood or can dance in time with the music, creating a light show. The bigger the speaker, the bigger the battery. Rather than

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try and downsize this element, the team decided to find positives, which is how they arrived at the idea of the JBL Charge, which can use its battery size to also connect and charge other mobile devices. For the even bigger Xtreme Bluetooth speaker, the team conceived of adding a shoulder strap to make it easier to carry. “I remember the first time we presented this idea of wearing a speaker and everyone was looking at us: ‘It doesn’t make sense!’,” says Mackiewicz. “It turns out the customers buying this product love it. And we are also very happy that we are working at a company where we can do these experiments and we can launch them. It’s not just designers working internally and dreaming about something.”

PROTOTYPING IS PARAMOUNT

To verify initial ideas, the designers often start with card and paper mockups, in order to help them judge the dimensions and proportions of a proposed product, although of course, these often change as speaker components are assembled. When these designs are intended for the professional series, the scale is much larger, so prototypes take on further roles. “We need to consider a lot of ergonomics of it, how it is going to be carried around, where to position the handles,” says Demin. “There are sometimes vertical handles or handles on different sides, so you can manipulate the product, imagining you’re taking it from the truck to the floor, or mounting it and so on.” The huge drivers used in the JBL professional line – monitors typically piled high at gigs or suspended on mounts on stages – add a lot of weight, which needs to be balanced to benefit the teams manually setting up the equipment. “When those components are delivered from the factory, we place them in the dummy prototype, and it helps to verify the location of the handle. Maybe it needs a little shift to the left or right. Those kinds of details are crucial, and at each stage we work with the different components,” Demin says. “That’s where 3D printing is playing a huge role, because we can generate a lot of different options for ergonomic grip handles and other details that can be quickly verified and implemented in the final product.”

FUTURE CHALLENGES

Even with 75 years of experience in creating speakers of different sizes, for different audiences, the future looks certain to present new challenges for JBL. In the professional space, the big test going forward will be to maintain high-quality sound, but package it into smaller, more lightweight forms. “This remains a challenge, as the physics remain and the rules of how acoustics work are not really changing with time,” says Demin. “The user in the future would like to have bigger, stronger sounds, and at the same time more lightweight, compact, easy and ergonomic solutions, whether it’s the artist, the installer, or a regular consumer.” On the consumer side, sustainability of products is the big concern. Rampant consumption and the subsequent consequences of millions of discarded electronic products are having a terrible effect on the planet. “I think the biggest challenge for us as designers is how do you make sure people use your product for more than one year, without getting bored by it?” says Mackiewicz. “It’s easy now to have 20 pairs of sneakers or 100 T-shirts, even if they don’t need them, so how do you make sure somebody falls in love with your product and uses it constantly?” To appeal to JBL’s young, active audience, he adds, the company must continue to focus on the work of adding more to a speaker than just great sound: “A strap, a clip – it’s like there’s a second element to the speaker. And that’s what we’re always trying to achieve.” Carried, clipped or simply perched on a shelf in the home, JBL looks set to add more to audio for a long time to come. jbl.com

7 Positioning the components ●

in the JBL Pulse

8 ● 9 3D-printed prototypes ●

bring the LEDs of the Pulse to life and allow for testing of different finishes

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PROFILE

PERFECT PLAYBACK

PMC’s designs are involved in every link of the music-making chain, from the recording studio to listening at home, which means it knows exactly how to present music just as the artist intended

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The goal of a loudspeaker is to replicate sound exactly as recorded – so who better to achieve this than experts taking their knowledge of studio monitors and applying it to home speakers? Stephen Holmes speaks to the team at PMC Audio to hear more

MC Audio founder Peter Thomas has the perfect metaphor to explain the process of audio engineering to the uninitiated. Audio, he says, “is like shining a light through seven plates of glass that are slightly opaque, and the light just about reaches the end. If you clean one of the plates, then the light still doesn’t all reach the end, because the other opaque plates stop it. So, what you’ve got to do is clean each opaque plate to gain some improvement to get the light better at the end – and that is what audio is about.” In other words, there’s no magic solution based on fixing one particular component or element, he says. “You have to raise the game in all of them.”

1 After more than three decades dedicated to recreating flawless audio, PMC has got closer than most. The company got started in 1991, when it delivered its first-ever products to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. Britain was going through a recession at the time, but former BBC Radio engineer Thomas and his business partner Adrian Bauch were able to kickstart the Professional Monitor Company (PMC) with one product and a single customer. Guerilla marketing played its part. PMC speakers were lugged around various music labels and Hollywood studios in the back of a van. Today, the company’s products are used by an impressive number of leading recording studios and some three-quarters of all film scores are mastered using PMC kit, according to Thomas. The goal has always been to replicate sound as close to how it was intended to be heard by its producers – and that applies equally to mixing desks and homes.

1 PMC partnered ●

with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory to develop laser scanning that enables the sound from a speaker to be ‘seen’, enabling radical new designs

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PROFILE

2 LOW NOTES PMC’s flagship studio model, the QB-1, is a beast. It’s designed to be mounted in studio walls, where it is able to produce the full frequency range as loudly and as clearly as possible. Key to this is a technique from the 1960s called Transmission Line, a method of producing more bass from a smaller cabinet. PMC’s highly tuned version of the technology is known as Advanced Transmission Line (ATL). After snaking through a cabinet lined with a proprietary acoustic foam that absorbs all but the very lowest frequencies, the bass exits from a front-panel vent, extending the low-frequency response, and creating the impression of a far larger speaker. The calculations required to perfect this are complex. These frequencies need to exit the speaker in phase with the output from the drivers. Yet the results are worth the effort, with ATL producing clean and clear bass that doesn’t mask the rest of the music. Oliver Thomas, Peter’s son and company CTO heads up PMC’s team of five engineers. “The speakers are tools for mixing audio in the studio world. That is always the core, fundamental part: the performance, how it measures, how it sounds,” he says. “The very first step of the product development cycle is looking at the speaker enclosure, because that’s the biggest variable in many ways to try and nail down. We then develop the acoustics within that, and then move from that towards other aspects, like the electronics, and finally a bit more of the aesthetic design to pull it all together.” Speed of iteration is important here. Simulation tools play an important role, but building a physical product to test is essential. Using Solidworks, the team builds the initial 3D CAD model around its ideas for how the acoustics will work inside the speaker enclosure.

From here, the engineers assess the design using a ‘rudimentary’ proprietary simulation tool, and then use Comsol to run an FEA analysis focused inside the enclosure. Additional simulation software like the niche Physical Lab LEAP may also direct the design, with its analysis of crossover electronics. Once developed in CAD, prototypes can be physically built, and further analysis undertaken.

TESTING TIMES With the mechanicals and the acoustics nailed down, Oliver Thomas and team then start to take a look at electronics. “It’s typically the crossover: we have multiple different drive units in an enclosure that produce different frequencies better, and so we need to filter the frequencies from the audio signal to be sent to the right driver,” he explains. Listening tests are synonymous with this part of the process. These tend to take place in the later stages of development, with engineers using their ears to make sure that the measuring done to this point is accurate.

2 PMC monitors ●

are found in a wide range of professional mixing studios for the music and film industries 3 Proprietary ●

Advanced Transmission Line technology enables clear bass frequencies

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4 When PMC moved into its new facility in Bedfordshire, UK, the team built a hemi-anechoic chamber, used for taking measurements and analysing performance, giving it the chance to compare real-life results against simulations. “It’s quite a balancing act between the listening tests and the actual measurements,” says Thomas, “But as we get more sophisticated measurements, that gap starts to close a bit further.” An R&D project in partnership with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) helped further close the gap. PMC co-developed a new acoustic measurement technique using a laser-based technology to measure tiny changes in the refractive index of the air in front of the speaker that were caused by the sound, allowing them to measure the sound pressure. This took analysis to the next level. “Rapidly, we could measure at each different point in a sort of threedimensional space in front of the speakers,” says Thomas. “We could literally build up a 3D image of a soundwave being transmitted from the speaker, in a way that is only possible with some simulation software.”

SOUNDING CLEAR However perfect speakers might be on paper, explains Peter Thomas, there is always a level of ‘unknown’ in how audio works and how to get the very best results. “It’s still a 50/50 between actual engineering measurements and using these two things on your head, because none of the measurements really tell you how it’s going to sound as a whole,” he explains. “It’ll tell you how individual elements sound, and how accurate they are, but you can produce a speaker that measures wonderfully well, but sonically has something wrong with it.”

To attain the best possible results, most elements of the speakers are produced in-house, or made to specification by a small number of trusted specialists. The faultless veneered cabinets, meanwhile, are still CNC-machined and hand-assembled in Britain, with both old and new skills mixing to achieve the right balance of craftsmanship and minute tolerances. PMC is now in the first stages of using 3D-printed production parts. It has already used some small SLS components in initial production runs, before tooling was created for injection moulding. With its products fitting the low-volume/highvalue mould, there’s every chance that more additive manufacturing will figure in future designs, as market demands mean shorter development times. In the early days of the company, Peter Thomas used modelling clay to sculpt the front of the speaker, which could take weeks. Now, with 3D modelling, parts can be 3D-printed, tested and iterated in a matter of hours until, sound-wise, they’re perfected. “As a company, that’s what keeps you alive – developing new techniques – and that’s where Oliver and his team come in, with new techniques to explore areas that I just didn’t have time to do,” he says. “He’s measuring vibrations now on cabinets down to infinitesimal levels. I knew they were there, and I could measure them, but I didn’t have the time to develop a better cabinet.” Little by little, he adds, PMC is gradually nibbling away at unwanted vibrations in ways that make the final product sound much better for customers. So while it might be true that light will never shine at full strength through those seven glass plates, for PMC, the future is looking much clearer.

4 PMC’s home audio ●

range is selected by discerning audiophiles worldwide

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PROFILE

SLICKER FIT Speed of delivery makes all the difference with custom products – and in-ear monitors are no exception. At ACS Custom, a fully digital workflow is used to produce earpieces for professionals

CS Custom produces in-ear monitors (IEM) responsible for keeping musicians tied to their music when performing live on stage. Made from soft, medicalgrade silicone, each IEM is created on a bespoke basis for the customer, in order to provide the perfect fit. Since customers often need fast access to these made-to-measure products, ACS has built its business, based in Banbury, UK, around an entirely digital workflow, according to managing director, Andy Shiach. “When we decide we want to make a product, we can design it and 3D print it within the space of a couple of days. Then, if we realise we need to revise our design, we can do that immediately,” he explains. “If we had to tool and injection-mould the products we make, the time and costs involved would be prohibitive.” Instead, the company can go from a design concept to a final product in as little as three to four days. All of its IEMs proudly feature state-of-the-art Knowles drivers and ACS’s own proprietary crossovers to ensure artists hear the music as it was intended to be heard.

INSIDE KNOWLEDGE For its earpieces, ACS 3D-prints parts for eggshell casting, taking advantage of the ability to print ultra-thin walls using its 3D Systems Figure 4 Standalone to create moulds for injecting silicone. Here, the material used is Figure 4 Eggshell-AMB 10 material. Once injected, the 3D-printed mould can be broken and peeled away - like an eggshell - to reveal a silicone part that ACS then post-processes, marks and finishes. The digital workflow isn’t just efficient. It also enables the company to tackle larger and more complicated products than ever before, according to technical director Dan Bennett.

1 “We can now print geometries inside the silicone moulds, whereas before, we would have to drill it all out by hand,” he says. “What’s more, the dimensional accuracy of the Figure 4 printer ensures we don’t need to do as many iterations or build tolerances into the parts.” 3D Systems’ 3D Sprint software plays a key role in attaining the surface quality required, says Bennett. “When the outside surface quality is important, we can reduce the touchpoint size and position of supports really accurately.” The digital workflow is also what enables ACS to give its customers an ‘anytime assurance’ that lost or damaged products will be replaced precisely to original specifications. “If we did this by hand and you ever needed a replacement, it would never be identical to the one you lost,” says Shiach. “With 3D printing, we can absolutely recreate the same article.” For ACS, the digital workflow drives business success; whether it’s helping out an existing customer needing a replacement, or attracting a new client wanting a bespoke item.

1 ACS Custom in-ear ●

monitors are used by a wide range of musicians

2 3D printing allows ●

geometries to be built inside moulds, to avoid a manual drilling process

3 3D Sprint software ●

allows minimal supports, preserving the part’s surface finish 4 The 3D Systems ●

Figure 4 Standalone is used to create moulds for injecting silicone

acscustom.com

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PROFILE

BASS RESPONSE Airpulse founder Phil Jones is looking to create audiophile sound quality without the audiophile price tag. He speaks to Stephen Holmes about the advances in simulation and testing that help to achieve this goal

hen designing loudspeaker systems, Airpulse founder Phil Jones likes to work from the ground up, ensuring that all aspects of design and engineering fit the concept precisely. For example, with a home bookshelf speaker like the Airpulse A300, the experienced loudspeaker engineer works with his industrial design team to ensure the product looks just as good on that shelf as it sounds. ““Very often, industrial design does not follow the laws of acoustics, so it is very important that I lay down specifics for the ID team to work around,” Jones says from his US home. Typically, this involves using AutoCAD for mechanical drawings and Autodesk Inventor and Solidworks for 3D CAD work. “From my 40 years of speaker design, it has become almost an instinct for me to create transducers. However, we also need to make many sophisticated electrical, mechanical and acoustic measurements, so I can see how good – or bad – my design actually is!” Born and raised in London, UK, Jones initially aspired to become a famous bass player, yet discovered his real talent lay in designing loudspeakers. Having worked for numerous brands, he went on to found his own Airpulse label. A partnership with Chinese audio manufacturer Edifier has meant more control over the end product for Jones, and all the benefits of access to the booming Chinese audio manufacturing industry.

NEW TECH, OLD PROBLEMS Even with the latest technology, Jones explains, loudspeakers are far-from-perfect devices, since they are “not linear”. In theory, a cone speaker should move exactly with the motion of the voice-coil, like a piston. Yet due to the cone’s geometry, the elasticity of the material used and the suspension systems involved, it often reacts differently than expected. “It can break up at fairly low frequencies, both concentrically and radially. This is stored-up energy, and it has nothing to do with the true electro-mechanical motion of the voice coil,” Jones explains. A Doppler laser interferometer is used to scan the cone as it is subjected to an audio input, allowing engineers to look at it under any frequency in a 3D or 2D cross-section, helping to weed out imperfections.

The speaker requires extensive auditioning in a variety of rooms and playing different kinds of music. For this, Jones uses a free software, Room EQ Wizard from Room Acoustics Software. He describes this as an “awesome piece of kit”, which works well with a variety of hardware. However, nobody has yet created software to test speaker vents for air turbulence, he adds. The air speed through the vent tube on a loudspeaker can reach up to 70 mph, and with air passing both in and out, the velocity can generate a lot of turbulence. This, says Jones, is heard as distortion, “kind of like a chuffing sound in the bass”. To combat this in the Airpulse range, the vent tube design was 3D-printed for wind tunnel testing, allowing the designer to iterate on its initial oval design with a parabolic flare at both ends. Physical testing to this day helps to hone the sound, and with 40 years of experience, Jones has an accurate ear for pleasing customers new and old.

1 The Airpulse A300 ●

is designed for the home 2 With the A300, ●

simulation software is used to get the best frequency performance from components, such as its horn-loaded ribbon tweeter

airpulsepro.com

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04/05/2021 09:28

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Valve’s Index VR head-mounted display was the first to feature Tectonic Audio Labs’ new speaker

THE GOLD STANDARD

Tectonic Audio Labs created a balanced mode radiator speaker using electromagnetics, mechanical and acoustics simulation. It was implemented into a VR headset for Valve. and is now regarded as the gold standard for VR audio

irtual reality (VR) is meant to immerse the user in the virtual world as much as possible, by making the environment feel as real as can be. When VR is done right, you could visit a historical site from your couch, experience a habitat from eons past at a museum, or explore Mars or the Moon from the comfort of your living room. The gaming industry is making great strides in VR development, but one challenge that game developers have encountered is how to effectively obtain suspension of disbelief in the virtual world. Whether you’re using VR to study an asteroid approaching Earth,

or playing a game where you have to fire missiles at it, the more immersive the experience, the better. Other entertainment fields, like literature and film, face the same challenge of suspension of disbelief, but there’s something exclusive to VR: audio immersion.

AUDIO IMMERSION IN THE VALVE INDEX HEADSET Valve Corporation, a leading developer in the gaming industry, creates games, gaming platforms and gaming hardware. With the development of its Valve Index VR headset, the company sought to provide exactly that suspension of disbelief. To do so, Valve engineer Emily Ridgway and her team had to figure out how to create an immersive audio experience.

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PROFILE

While playing video games, people often wear stereo headphones to determine where the sound is coming from, relative to their character in the game. If the source is to the left of the character, the player will hear the sound through the left headphone speaker, and vice versa. The Valve team decided against using traditional headphones, because these are designed to isolate sound, cancel noise and exaggerate frequency responses – not to create audio immersion. Ridgway was concerned that the very physical design of headphones could counteract audio immersion. For one thing, headphones put sound directly into the ear canal, so the sound can feel imagined (known as an internalised auditory source), coming from within the person’s head, or otherwise ‘not real’. Also, headphones can be physically uncomfortable and this discomfort can distract a user from the gaming experience. Some opt for loudspeakers instead of headphones, but while loudspeakers mitigate some of these issues, they come with their own problems. The sound of a loudspeaker is affected by the geometry and acoustics of the real room. Another reason is that they have a ‘sweet spot’ that the player would need to stay in for best sound quality, but when people experience VR, they tend to move around. Ridgway’s solution? A pair of ultra-near-field, fullrange, off-ear (extra-aural) headphones. She and her team went through several types of audio speakers for the headset. None quite fit their goals – none, that is, until

they found Tectonic Audio Lab’s balanced mode radiator (BMR) speakers. Ridgway immediately noticed several positive benefits, as she wrote in a blog post: “They reduced colouration due to speaker mispositioning, were almost within range of our weight target, had great frequency response in high-mid ranges (important for binaural simulations), and were much thinner than traditional speaker drivers.” Valve teamed up with Tectonic Audio Labs to harness these benefits and design custom speakers for its VR headset.

WHAT IS BMR SPEAKER TECHNOLOGY? In traditional speakers, audio is generated by a cone diaphragm moving pistonically. This movement transfers energy along the axis of movement and creates sound. BMR speakers are different, in that they are utilising bending waves: waves that are moving perpendicular to the propagation direction. This means that they have more interaction with the surrounding air, so are able to transfer more energy. Higher frequencies can be difficult for traditional speakers to handle, as they can cause the traditional diaphragm to ripple or bend, also known as cone breakup. The subsequent peaks and troughs decrease audio quality and increase placement sensitivity. While most speakers try to avoid bending waves, BMR embraces them. “We embrace the bending modes and want them to occur. We can control where they occur, and it’s those

1 Directivity and ●

polar plots for the BMR speaker analysis 2 Cutaway view of ●

the BMR speaker

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PROFILE

bending modes that preserve the off-axis output. We’re using resonance breakup to our advantage,” says Tim Whitwell, vice president of engineering at Tectonic Audio. “In many ways, BMR goes against the thinking of traditional acoustic engineering.” BMR technology is able to exploit this highfrequency rippling through the optimisation of several characteristics, such as material selection and mass loading. Through this exploitation of the bending modes, and the superposition of both the bending and piston modes, sound is evenly propagated in the BMR speaker.

CREATING THE GOLD STANDARD The team at Tectonic Audio Labs got to work on the audio speakers for the Valve Index VR headset. “For us, the starting point is to analyse the modal structure of the diaphragm,” Whitwell says. “What’s really important for us with the BMR is to make sure that the modal behaviour begins right when the pistonic behaviour begins beaming.” Once beaming is about to begin, the bending modal behaviour begins, which ‘fills in’ the off-axis output that the beaming neglects. In order to optimise this behaviour, the Tectonic team first had to figure out where in the disc bending modal behaviour occurs and how many bending modes occur across the bandwidth. It used the Comsol Multiphysics software to perform an eigenfrequency analysis of this behaviour. From there, the team was able to control the bending modes through optimising the thickness and material of the disc. By making sure this behaviour occurs precisely where and when they want it to occur, Tectonic Audio is able to preserve the speaker’s wide directivity output throughout the range. Tectonic also analysed the motor design, performing an electromagnetics analysis to optimise the voice coil. “You can add many turns to your voice coil wire to increase your conversion of electromagnetic to mechanical energy, but your weight goes up, and so you have competing constraints there,” Whitwell explains. “All of that optimisation we do within Comsol.” The mechanical and electromagnetics models were processed and optimised separately. Tectonic Audio Lab’s next step was to bring the two together for a coupled analysis. Because nearly everything in the model is axisymmetric, it was able to model the coupling in a 2D axisymmetric space,

saving computational resources. The diaphragm material is the exception. “The diaphragm material itself is actually orthotropic; it has different stiffnesses in different directions,” Whitwell explains, “The Solid Mechanics interface in Comsol Multiphysics lets us model the orthotropic nature of the material within the 2D axisymmetric space, which is really fantastic.” After the team developed the fully coupled model, they introduced other elements, like the spider suspension, which centres the coil and controls its movement. At the same time, they continued optimising the fully coupled model to ensure that the diaphragm’s behaviour would be balanced – which is the key to the BMR technology, allowing it to work properly in the Valve Index VR headset and provide a great experience for different users. Once the speakers are fully dialed in, the suspension is the next focus, and its geometry is analysed in a nonlinear study. “We deform the suspension geometry up and down, to see how the stiffness of those components changes with displacement,” Whitwell says. “And again, there’s a lot of optimisation required there.” Whitwell emphasises that this optimisation was particularly important in this project, “Any noise in the drive unit or distortions would be very, very obvious to the listener.” After the suspension is fully optimised, it goes back into the coupled model. “We make sure that everything is still giving us the performance we desire,” Whitwell says, “And then we can go and build a prototype.”

3 Fully coupled BMR ●

model, visualising the magnetic flux density in the motor and total displacement in the moving parts (diaphragm, coil surround and spider) at 5 kHz

THE ‘KING’ OF VR HEADSETS After Tectonic Audio Lab’s design optimisation and prototyping were successful, Valve Corporation was able to bring its headset to market. Since then, it has earned many, many positive reviews. One example is a beloved and popular YouTube channel called Linus Tech Tips. In August 2019, Linus uploaded a video called “Maybe VR isn’t dead after all...” in which he reviewed the Valve Index Headset. He was initially ambivalent about the speakers, but after a day of using the headset, Linus was impressed. “They actually sound shockingly good!” he said, somewhat incredulously. At the end of the video, Linus holds up the Valve Index Headset and looks directly into the camera, saying: “This is absolutely the king of VR gaming headsets.” tectonicaudiolabs.com | comsol.com DEVELOP3D.COM MAY 2021 39

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05/05/2021 08:20

REVIEWS

PTC Creo 8 With Creo 8, PTC continues to successfully juggle the tasks of reinventing long-established workflows and adding brand-new tools and technologies from acquisitions and partnerships, as Al Dean reports

ver the last few releases, some interesting things have been happening with PTC’s flagship product design and engineering system, Creo. Not since the days of the move from Pro/Engineer to Wildfire have we seen this amount of investment in the core tools within the system. The overwhelming impression is of a company successfully juggling the tasks of reinventing longestablished workflows, and adding brand-new tools and technologies that have arrived at PTC through acquisition and partnership. In Creo 7 and its subsequent release cycle, we saw the integration of multibody modelling with some fresh thinking on established modelling methods, as well as the integration of generative design technology from PTC’s 2018 purchase of Frustum. We also saw the company’s partnership with Ansys continue to bear fruit. Integration with Ansys’s real-time simulation technology continues apace, in the form of Creo Simulation Live, while for those looking for traditional simulation, there’s been the release of the Creo Ansys Simulation module, which brings to Creo’s

» Product: Creo 8 » Supplier: PTC Price: On Application ptc.com

UI the Ansys Mechanical solver. Since then, capabilities have continued to grow. A solid example is the evolution of single-goal generative design tools into a more mature form of generative design. Here, instead of using a combination of topology optimisation and some smart geometry wrangling to achieve a singular optimum, we see a ‘design of experiments’ approach and use of cloud-based compute to explore many more options for inputs (such as materials or manufacturing constraints). The result is a far broader exploration of a design space and more options at the end of it all. So, with all this in mind, shall we explore what the worldwide community of Creo can expect to see in Creo 8?

CORE USER EXPERIENCE

1 Snapshots allows ●

you to gain greater understanding of how features are built and then reuse that data efficiently and intelligently

The Creo user interface has remained pretty consistent over the last 20 years – but that’s not to say it hasn’t been consistently improved, too. For the Creo 8 release, dialogues and panels from the Creo dashboard can now be floated and docked as the user sees fit. This can be achieved on an operation-byoperation basis. The system will retain those positions and display states so your

working environment stays the same. Another change is the way in which the system displays datums. There’s some real modernisation here, in a system with a history stretching back nearly 35 years. Finally, the user gets greater control over entity transparency for bodies, quilts and tessellated geometry, which should make working with more data clearer (no pun intended). Alongside these seemingly minor but key improvements, there are also two new capabilities in Creo 8 that look set to impact almost every user’s workflow and efficiency. The first is a new method of organising geometric data in part files. We’re all familiar with how a history tree is used to organise a linear progression of a part’s construction. The problem is that while the history tree is useful for understanding a relatively simple part, it can become more of a burden than a benefit with more complex parts, particularly where you’re taking advantage of multibody modelling. It’s here that the new Design Items folder comes into play. This sits separately from the history tree, allowing you to organise your bodies and surfaces (or in Creo parlance, quilts) exactly how you want them, rather than how the system demands.

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

2 You can have nested folders and drag and drop geometric entities between them, all independently of the history tree. There’s cross highlighting, too, so selecting a part on-screen highlights it in both the model and the design item lists – and vice versa. For a single user, this makes sense and helps organise work. If you’re working in a team, then it’s a must, particularly if that team is using complex modelling practices. Alongside Design Items is another new feature that will change how folks work, called Snapshots. Again, this is mostly relevant to more complex practices. In particular, it’s great for situations where geometry used to build a feature will be consumed upon completion, but you still want to understand how the model was built or reuse that geometry to carry out another operation. With Snapshots, you select the feature in question, right-click in the model tree and choose Show Snapshot. This will show you the geometry used to create that feature. On its own, this is super-useful for understanding how features are built, particularly if you’re revisiting older work or someone else’s work. Taking things further, there’s also a Copy Snapshot command. This takes the geometry in question (the red surfaces in Figure 1) and copies it to the correct position in the feature tree for reuse. The link is maintained should you update the original.

PRODUCT MODELLING Moving on to updates and enhancements to part and assembly tools proper, the new Inseparable Assemblies functionality looks interesting, particularly for those who work with bought-in parts and sub-

systems. In these situations, users often want to keep the full digital definition of parts, sub-assemblies and so on, in order to ensure that mass calculations are based on accurate, material quantities. At the same time, they don’t want the headache of managing and documenting each component in that part. By defining an assembly model as ‘inseparable’, it is classed as a single part from that point onwards. Subsequently, components can still be extracted to make them individually useful. This works as well with imported geometry as it does with native geometry. Elsewhere, there’s been a ton of work done on holes. The system now supports wider hole types, to include NPT, PTF and ISO 7 standards, allowing a straight drilled hold to be combined with a tapered hole section. Placement of holes and use of lightweight holes is also improved. So if your part has multiple holes in a single plane, it’s now possible to very quickly define multiples in one shot. This relies on a sketch-based method, where a point is added wherever you need one. Interestingly, there’s also an option to take advantage of line entities to achieve similar results. For example, if you sketch a line, it’s possible to have the system add a hole at both the end point vertices and/or the mid-point. While these updates focus on creating complex hole definitions as quickly as possible, it might also be the case that your part has hundreds of holes and isn’t the most efficient part on the planet to hold in memory. To get around this, it’s possible to switch to lightweight/graphics-only representations,

which should make manipulation much more efficient. (This was available before, but has now been expanded to include tapered holes and more.) Other notable improvements include added support for slots in PCB import processes; support for tape and stiff shrink fit fittings on harnesses and wire routing; the ability in sheet metal to create multiple flanges off a set of curves in a single step (including mitre and corner relief where needed); plus, there’s a new curve type added, in the form of a geodesic that finds the shortest distance between two points over a surface.

2 Gyroid lattices can ●

be used on efficient heat exchangers (Model courtesy of Dr Andreas Vlahinos, printed on an EOS metal printer)

DOCUMENTATION & MBD (MODEL-BASED DEFINITION) Whether you call it model-based definition (MBD), product and manufacturing information (PMI) or 3D annotation, the use of a 3D model as the host for the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) that’s an essential precursor to the production process is gaining ground as an idea. In some quarters, it’s an idea that’s being adopted. While the traditional 2D drawing isn’t going away, many organisations are looking for new ways to work and, in some cases, consolidate their intellectual property as 3D models. PTC has been ahead of the MBD curve for quite some time, pouncing on it before many of its competitors. That headstart shows up in the maturity of the tools on offer. While other software companies are still trying to get their houses in order to support these processes, PTC is already tackling some of their nuances and finer points, ensuing that users who choose to go down to this path have the tools they need. DEVELOP3D.COM MAY 2021 43

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Evidence of this shows up in the new symbol gallery, which contains all of the standards and industryspecific symbols you might need, along with the newly streamlined placement and editing workflow. Take, for example, weld symbols; where once you might have defined a weld symbol and attached it to the appropriate set of geometric features to define a weld in situ, you can now create the data when you create the weld feature which automatically populate into the annotation. This means all of your data is centralised more effectively. Then there’s the way the PTC team has reworked surface collection – the process by which you select the faces on a part you want to annotate. There are now many more options for automatic face selection (tangency, by loop, and so on), saving you the trouble of having to do this manually. Lastly on the MBD front, the GD&T Advisor introduced in Creo 7 has proven useful for those users who are new to MBD and old hands alike. It’s an active system that checks your applied annotations to ensure that they’re consistent and fully defined. It’ll identify where annotations are incomplete or inconsistently defined, or where geometry has been edited during design changes and references are out of date as a result. You can just dive in and fix those annotations while the system’s running, so it’s much more interactive than a simple syntax checker. For Creo 8, this has been updated to support assemblies as well as just parts. Before we step away from documentation of

design and engineering, I also wanted to touch on something that’s new in the drawing environment too. It relates to managing legacy drawings that, for one reason or another, are not connected to a 3D model. As we’re all aware, one of the benefits of the ‘3D model to 2D drawing’ approach is that each view is generated from the model, maintaining inherent associations with the source model and to other views on a drawing sheet. If you’ve got a drawing that is disconnected from a 3D model, or which was hand-drawn originally, that relationship between different orthographic views does not exist. Well, there are now tools that allow you to redefine views within a legacy drawing and add that intelligence back in.

SIMULATION AND GENERATIVE DESIGN While Creo 6, 7 and subsequent inter-release updates have hugely expanded the simulation offerings available in Creo, this release sees those tools gain even more capability across the board. For example, in the case of the real-time Creo Simulation Live (based, as we’ve discussed, on Ansys’s Discovery Live technology), the Creo integration gains steady state fluid flow capabilities to compliment the transient state capabilities already present. In fact, steady state has become the default! On the subject of Simulation Live, the system also includes probes to get specific data from specific points of interest in a model. The issue in the past was that, once defined, these could not be

adjusted. It was a case of deleting and recreating them. Now, they can be edited in situ, saving you a bit of time when adjusting a model and simulation. On the Creo Ansys Simulation front, which sees the Ansys Mechanical solver integrated into the Creo interface, the bulk of the work was done between the initial Creo 7 release and now. But there was clearly still room for some improvement, particularly in the area of mesh control. A mesh control setting is now made available to the user and edited through the simulation tree, as you do with all other simulation related items, inputs and outputs. There is also additional mesh diagnostics feedback from the process manager – which will help you troubleshoot any issues more quickly. Lastly, the licensing of this module is a little more seamless, so Creo will automatically pull a licence when the tools are started up, rather than requiring the user to explicitly obtain one. Moving on from more traditional forms of simulation and into the brave ‘new’ (well, 20 years old) world of generative design, the integration of Frustrum’s technology continues. As with many such tools, the core workflow here is to define loads and constraints (both geometric, in the form of features required and keep-out areas); material definitions; shape control (to guide a solution towards being suitable for particular manufacturing processes); and, typically, a design domain. The issue here is that while the user might be

EXPLORING DESIGN ALTERNATIVES: CREO & CLOUD COMPUTATION

1 Set up loads, constraints, materials, and design criteria ●

2 Generate individual design locally within Creo Generative ●

Topology Optimization

3 Send complete study definition to cloud and determine ● which designs will be generated

4 Simultaneously generate designs in Generative Design ●

5 Expand details for individual result and review ●

6 Apply filters to results to focus on the best designs ●

7 Compare best results side-by-side to identify the ●

8 Send design from GDX to Creo as a new part ●

9 Reconstruct new design as B-rep geometry ●

in Creo

Extension

preferred design

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SOFTWARE REVIEW

aware of the first three items, the design domain can be tricky. If you get it wrong, you could steer your optimisation study in the wrong direction entirely. To make this easier, Creo 8 introduces a tool to take stock of your defined constraints, then work out the most suitable design domain automatically. Of course, you can still dive in and define your own domain, but this will get you there quickly. Elsewhere in the Generative Design Extension, there’s been work done on geometry reconstruction – something that’s a strong point of Frustum’s tech, in that it can give you very smooth, near-productionready surfaces. For Creo 8, these have been improved, particularly when working with a ‘casting’ geometry constraint. Now, parting curves and draft angles defined in the optimisation process will be maintained and used to drive the reconstruction of the geometry in Creo. There’s a new option to control the smoothness of the final shapes – specifically, to ensure that a minimum crease radius is respected. This should reduce the stress/strain concentrators that can often arise from topology optimisation-based processes. Finally, for generative design and on a local computation front, it’s now possible to run optimisations asynchronously. Previously, you’d lose access to Creo while a run completed, but now you can start off an optimisation to run in the background and work on another dataset at the same time. The Process Manager schedules tasks running in the background then sends you a notification when they’ve completed.

MACHINING & AM From its earliest days, PTC has always had a presence in the CAM and CNC programming world. Things got a bit of a boost a few years ago (around Creo 5), when the company acquired libraries from Machining Strategist. This brought its CAM tools up to more modern standards, particularly on the high-speed machining front in the 3-axis world. For Creo 8, this has been expanded to support 5-axis operations for both roughing and automatic deburring. There’s also some interesting work around taking existing toolpaths and converting them into 5-axis operations, in order to help with both reach and when working with shorter tooling. On top of this, you’ll also find new 3+2 capabilities introduced to roughing and rest roughing, if that’s your bag. Moving away from machining and onto the hot topic of recent times: additive manufacturing (AM). No release these days can pass without the ‘A word’ coming up. It seems like every vendor is trying to shoehorn in the tools that support the creation of parts using 3D printing techniques, irrespective of their actual use in the field.

3 That said, PTC offers a set of AM tools that’s better than most. The last few releases have seen latticing tools added into the system for lightweighting and the development of more structured parts/ materials. For the Creo 8 release, this work continues with a focus on two key areas: simulation driven lattices and formulabased lattice structures, with some tweaks and additions to how these are created. The tweaks to formula-driven lattices allow you not only to create the solid portion within a gyroid lattice (commonly used in heat transference and radiation applications), but also the negative space. This of course means that you’re able to conduct fluid and heat simulation tasks to validate your work more easily. The simulation-driven design work, however, is where things get really interesting. It works like this. Carry out a stress analysis run on your product, using the tools at hand. Once done, take either the results file (from Creo Simulate) or a set of probe points (From Creo Simulation Live) and use these as the basis for varying either thickness of the beams in a uniform lattice, or the density of lattice with uniform beam size within your part at the point where the simulation tells you it is required. Higher stress equals more support. Of course, the simulation is based on a solid, uniform block. Replacing that with a variable lattice is going to need some iteration to find the right balance. Finally on the AM side of things, there has also been some work done on tidying up lattices; specifically, the removal of any ‘dangling beams’, where a lattice’s elements do not complete a triangulation and just hang out in free space. These can quite easily cause issues in the build process.

IN CONCLUSION We also looked at Creo this time last year. Back then, our feeling was that PTC’s

big focus was on extending partnerships (particularly with Ansys), building brandnew tools and technologies, and not being afraid to revisit existing tools and workflows and improve them. I’m happy to report that there’s been little deviation from this three-pronged strategy – and that’s 100% a good thing. Once again, we’ve seen the partnership with Ansys bearing fruit and extending Creo’s simulation capabilities. This applies to both the real-time Simulation Live tools and the more traditional tools, and now extends to including the Ansys Mechanical solvers directly in the Creo interface. If you’re going to partner with a simulation vendor and take advantage of its knowledge and capabilities, Ansys is a pretty solid bet, right? Alongside this, the extension of newer tools such as design for additive and generative design show there’s a good opportunity for Creo users to experiment not just with new ways of creating designed and engineered forms, but also to optimise those forms and more traditional parts for new methods of production. The perfect example here is the ability to generate the negative space in gyroid forms. Then we get to the updates and rework of the core modelling tools. These are perhaps my favourites. Generating a simulation-driven lattice that needs to be additively manufactured is one thing, but if you can give a whole community of users tools that let them all get their work done in a more efficient manner, that’s a much more far-reaching benefit. The new abilities that enable users to quickly take a peek at how a model was built and reuse geometry without needing to recreate it, or to organise their geometry data structure to make it easily understandable for themselves and others are examples of not being afraid to revisit age-old workflows. PTC should be applauded for it – and more vendors should think about adopting that approach themselves. ptc.com

3 Advanced surface ●

collection methods of semantic references for standalone annotations

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HARDWARE REVIEW

Shining 3D EinScan HX With a solid reputation for affordable 3D scanners, Shining 3D is now bringing blue light-based scanning to its range for the first time, as Al Dean reports. He finds a device that’s as capable as it is versatile

egular readers will know that at DEVELOP3D, we’ve been fans of Shining 3D’s scanners some time now. You’ll also be aware of how the market for physicalform capture technology has blown up in recent years, with the increasing popularity of photogrammetry, which ranges from white light scanners sold for a couple of grand to the LiDAR sensor on the iPad in your bag or the iPhone in your pocket. Shining 3D’s approach has been to take what was considered cutting edge technology in the 3D world a few years ago and reinvent it at a lower pricepoint, effectively using economies of scale to make specialist equipment more readily available to the mass market. The company has already achieved this with white light scanners – and it’s now applying the same principle to blue lightbased scanning devices. Blue light scanners have pretty much become the de facto standard for noncontact form capture in recent years. Whether in the form of structured light or laser scan stripes, the use of this light wavelength delivers real benefits over more common and lower cost white light scanners, and these merit a quick backgrounder. Basically, blue light’s narrow wavelength is typically used in two ways: first, as a structured light form, where a known pattern is projected onto a surface and details are extrapolated via the capture of that pattern; or second, in laser form. Either way, with blue light, sensors/cameras are tuned to find a much narrower spectrum of light and filter out far more ambient light than white light-based counterparts. And less ambient light equals a crisper, less noisy scan. Blue light technology can also be used in a far brighter environment, meaning more real-world use and faster workflows. So, with that in mind, shall we dive in and see what Shining 3D’s newest scanner, the EinScan HX, can do?

1 » Product: EinScan HX » Supplier: Shining 3D Price: from £9,258 einscan.com

THE BASICS The EinScan HX shares form conventions with almost every handheld laser scanning device available. You have a handle, a series of buttons, and then a cluster of projection devices at one end and cameras and sensors at the other. The configuration of these two sets of outputs and inputs are known, enabling a 3D point in space to be captured. The set-up process for the EinScan HX is

1 Weighing in at ●

a mere 710g, the EinScan HX allows both a rapid scan using projected images and laser scanning using blue light

just about as plug-and-play as you could wish. The scanner is taken out of the Pelicase-like packaging and connected to both a power source and a high-speed USB slot on your workstation. The software and drivers are provided on a USB stick and are up and running in a matter of minutes – but before you start experimenting with your new device, you need to run through the calibration process. Here, the software will guide you through the process, also using the calibration plate provided with the device. This handily combines a template for your work surface and a hinged plate bearing a known series of registration targets. You begin with calibration of the structured light portion, then move on to calibration of the laser and the white balance (required for accurate texture capture). You’ll need to follow the on-screen prompts and spend a little time over the required tasks. Though it’s painful to admit, I got stuck on the white light calibration portion for about an hour. The calibration process just

wouldn’t complete properly – the compound effect, as it turns out, of two issues. The first issue was that I was running the scanner connected to a 5K2K display, which the EinScan software really did not like, responding by effectively cutting off half of the interface. To resolve this, you can either plug in a more standard aspect ratio display or reset your resolution temporarily while using the scanner. Once that was done and the full UI visible to me, I was able to solve the second issue quickly when I discovered a little note that told me to flip over the registration plate to show the white surface on the rear. With that task performed, the calibration was soon complete. A useful reminder to always read the bloody instructions first. From that point onwards, you’re golden. The software records when you last calibrated the device, with the official guidance being that you should do this whenever you move the scanner to a new location or whenever there’s been a temperature change (although blue light devices are typically less sensitive to this.) DEVELOP3D.COM MAY 2021 47

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HARDWARE REVIEW

SCAN MODES: RAPID VS LASER The EinScan HX has two scan modes: Rapid Scan and Laser Scan. I’d like to deal with each separately. First up, Rapid Scan is the structured light mode that uses image projection. You are effectively projecting a known image (similar to a QR code, but at a much finer resolution) onto your target’s surface. Thanks to a combination of knowledge about the position of the light source and the capture (and distortion) of an image by a camera in a known position means that a point in 3D space can be triangulated and stored. The benefit of this approach is that you can capture data very quickly and, if your object has a textured surface, you don’t really need to use registration targets. What’s interesting is that you can combine the self-registering nature of this approach with target dots when needed, taking a hybrid approach that’s useful for scanning less textured parts and in big projects where several scans need to be linked together. Rapid Scan works at a variety of resolutions, right down to 0.05mm with a volumetric accuracy of +0.1mm/m. The data capture rate is a little insane at 1,200,000 points per second at 20 frames per second and it works in the range of around 470mm from your object with a depth of field between 200mm and 700mm. While the system can use the texture of the object to track either the movement of the object and/or the scanner, it can also capture that texture and provide it to you if you need it. While in most reverse engineering workflows, where it’s the geometry that’s of most interest, this might be safely discarded. But then again, there are some workflows, such as asset capture for

2 visualisation, where it might well prove useful, so it’s good to have both options in a single device. Laser Scan mode differs in a couple of ways. First, rather than using projected images, the device emits a series of intersecting laser stripes. Again, the corresponding position of those stripes is captured and the coordinates of the various points recorded in 3D space. Resolution is higher (down to 0.04mm), with a volumetric accuracy of 0.06mm/m, capturing 480,000 points per second. What’s also different is that, rather than using texture, laser scanning relies on registration targets to track the movement of the scanner and object. In our tests, we use a combination of registration targets on a black turntable or across the surface of the object. Both work equally

well, assuming you have enough targets in view at any one time. (Here, more is most definitely better.)

SCANNING WORKFLOW

2 Feedback is useful ●

both on screen and on-device – and the EinScan HX works well in cramped and well-lit conditions

It might be slightly oversimplifying matters, but the workflow once you’ve selected the method most suitable for your task at hand, is much the same. The software works on a job-by-job basis. You create a storage point and within that job, you store each of your individual scan datasets (which are rather misleadingly named ‘projects’). Taking the example of the carburettor scan shown below, we began with a single laser scan around the part on a turntable. This allowed us to manipulate the part without a huge amount of space around it. Because the registration targets remain in

WORKFLOW: LASER SCAN OF A CARBURETTOR USING EINSCAN HX

1 We used a turntable with registration ●

2 This initial scan captured not only the ●

3 The EinScan software gives you a ●

4 Once you have two scans, you can work ●

5 Once we had completed our full set of ●

6 The smoothing and sharpening tools are ●

7 An important final step is to create a file ●

8 The final STL imported into Fusion 360, ●

targets in place and deployed the Laser Scan mode to completely scan an old Amal carburettor. We began with an initial scan in a single position

scans and aligned them all, we then went through the meshing process, enabling us to clean up the polygon mesh, identify holes and so on

part itself, but also the turntable and surrounding area – so it was immediately clear that some clean-up work would be required

particularly useful for removing the noise that’s an inherent part of any scanning process, although blue light-based devices do tend to cope with this more effectively

complete set of tools to manipulate, select and remove points that you don’t need, whether by painting, different lasso types or using a planar cut defined by targets

that’s usable in your target system. This is often a trade-off between data size and the resolution of the mesh you’re creating, and it all depends on your downstream needs

through an alignment process or defer the alignment until all of your scans have been done. We found that a feature-based alignment method works a treat

with a quick assembly mating feature added, and then used in context in an assembly. This was all accomplished, including set-up and learning, in a couple of hours or so

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a consistent position, it’s as if they were on the part itself. In terms of usability, the EinScan HX has some nice features. Obviously, the display on your workstation is your key source of information about what’s being scanned and captured, along with visual feedback on whether your distance from your object is working well and whether tracking is working or not. You also get some really nice on-device feedback. As you’ll see in figure 2, lights on the rear of the unit indicate how things are looking. Green means in range and tracking, yellow means too close, blue means too far, and red means tracking has been lost). This makes the process very intuitive. A single scan pass gave us a lot of unneeded data, which we removed using the built-in selection tools. Once scan data is in a good state, you can then create the point clouds and store this in your job. Obviously, you’re never going to capture a whole object in one pass, so the workflow is to create a new ‘project’ and carry out another scan. In our case, this meant repositioning the part on the turntable and scanning again. After clean-up was performed, we essentially had two scans, unaligned to one another. If we had placed targets on the part, they might have lined up properly (although the chances are against it.) That’s why the align operation in the software will quickly become your new best friend. This allows you to select one or more scan sets as the fixed data and then align others accordingly. There are several methods for doing this. For a part like the one shown (and most mechanical parts), you can use the feature alignment. This will find common features and use them as the basis for alignment of data. In our tests, this was pretty robust in most cases. However, if feature alignment fails, you can use textures or common registration targets, or revert to the old favourite of three-point alignment. Here, you indicate three (or more) common points on the two scans to align them. As you work around your object, you can very quickly build up a series of scans, align them, inspect the results, then work out where you need to scan next to capture missing data. The workflow is pretty intuitive and fast, depending of course on the size of your object. We only tested it with desktop-sized parts, but I’m told by users that the EinScan HX is pretty useful for larger projects too, from large components to full vehicle scans – it just takes a little advanced planning to accomplish these.

POINTS TO POLYS Whether you’re grabbing a quick-and-dirty scan in a single pass for a space envelope, or engaged in a more rigorous attempt to capture the entire form of a part, the end goal is the same: namely, a set of points

4 that represent the thing you’re scanning in the form that you need. Once done, you then have more decisions to make. Some systems will accept raw point data in ASC form. This would be your route, for example, if you are using the EinScan HX for inspection and metrology purposes. For the majority of applications, however, you’ll need to go through a tessellation process to turn points in polygons. Clearly, when you’re capturing data at a rate of a million or so points per second, turning all that into a polygon mesh would be insane. Thankfully, the EinScan software gives you a host of tools not only to reduce the complexity of your point cloud and derived mesh without reducing the quality of surface capture, but also to improve it. That typically takes the form of filling in holes, either manually or automatically; smoothing; and pure polygon count reduction. You can then export your data to the format you need, be that STL, OBJ (which can include texture information mapped to your polygon mesh), or 3MF.

CONCLUSION

3 The EinScan ●

The EinScan HX is available in a couple of different configurations, so it’s worth talking about those before we get onto price. The standalone scanner (which also includes a copy of Solid Edge Shining 3D Edition) comes in at £9,258.34. You can then add on additional software options, depending on your needs and workflow. These cover further post processing, conversion to CAD geometry (with Geomagic Essentials) and inspection (with Geomagic Control X or Verisurf CAD). At the base level, the product is pretty appealing, particularly if you’re looking for a system that you can pick up and use for a variety of tasks in the design and engineering realm. From a user perspective, the EinScan HX showcases how Shining 3D is maturing. The software is improving, as is the interface, particularly the colour-based feedback. If you’re in the market for a 3D scanning device, we recommend EinScan HX goes on your shortlist. It’s versatile enough to cover quite a few bases, while the results speak for themselves.

software offers a good level of visual feedback during scanning... 4 ...as well as in post●

processing workflows, such as aligning separate scan data into a cohesive whole

einscan.com

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THE LAST WORD

When it comes to learning new software tools, speed isn’t just a way to get work done faster. It can help us to fail faster, too – and then move on quickly and achieve dramatically better results, writes Al Dean

his month, I’ve been looking into a couple of new releases of pretty well-known tools in the design and engineering space; namely, PTC Creo 8 and nTopology’s latest nTop 3 release. While there are definite similarities between the two, their approach, use cases and target audiences are perhaps different. But one thing they have in common is that they both take advantage of GPU compute power. For those us who have been around long enough, the idea of the GPU as a must-have compute device is still strange. If you’ve grown up with a Windows desktop machine, the idea that the graphics card is anything other than a source of driver-related frustration and rage is baffling. But today’s GPUs, from the likes of Nvidia and AMD, are very different from that graphics card you once installed and then spent two weeks swearing at, while it caused merry hell with your CAD system – right up until the point that a signed-off, certified driver was updated. Today’s GPUs are beasts of computation and ideally suited to a number of key tasks that we carry out in the design and engineering world. NTopoplogy, as an example, has just delivered a year or more’s worth of work to implement GPU support in its system for wrangling complex geometry into shape. Now, rather than waiting for minutes for forms to update, you get near-real time performance. Slide those slides, or dial in new values, and the system reacts almost instantly. Another example is seen in Creo 8 and, specifically, in the work the team has done with Ansys to integrate more of the latter’s Discovery Live technology into Creo. It basically means an end to the tiring dance of waiting for endless rounds of updates to your parametric model, sending it to your simulation system, waiting for results, interpreting and tweaking again. Instead, you can tweak your parametric model and

get an instant view of how your part will perform structurally, thermally and when interacting with fluids. Of course, it’s natural to think that the real-time nature of both these sets of tools and their inherent workflows is purely about speed – the time taken to get a job done and out of the door more quickly. And, of course,

‘‘

fundamentally different. In both cases, it’s in the learning of tools, the becoming accustomed to them and skilled at using them, that speed pays real dividends. If we need to fail to succeed – insert your own inspirational Thomas Edison or Henry Ford misquote here – then the more quickly we can fail, the more quickly we can learn. After all, it’s no good being able to define a voronoi lattice-filled midsole based on a pressure map of a customer’s foot if you need to wait three days for it to compute – only to find that you’ve got a single digit wrong and your customer will be doomed to walking forever in circles. Speed makes learning efficient. Today, thanks to new GPUs, we have a great opportunity to learn new tools faster, as well as develop new, more efficient workflows.

NTopology 3.0 now lets you switch from CPU to GPU for computation of complex geometry forms

If we need to fail to succeed – insert your own inspirational Thomas Edison or Henry Ford misquote here – then the more quickly we can fail, the more quickly we can learn

’’

it absolutely is. But there’s also something more interesting at play here. NTopology’s toolset is a new one and while there are many folks investigating it (and similar products), there aren’t too many experienced users as yet. Everyone is a novice and learning as they go. The same could also be said of Creo’s real-time simulation tools. Yes, there has always been parametric CAD and simulation at the heart of what PTC does (anyone recall Pro/Mechanica?), but this is something

GET IN TOUCH: Email on al@x3dmedia.com or Tweet @alistardean. Are you developing and building products? We want to tell your story. Talk to us!

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