3D printing software company to partner with Ansys, nTop and EOS to advance additive manufacturing design and quality.
3D printing software company to partner with Ansys, nTop and EOS to advance additive manufacturing design and quality.
3D printing software provider Materialise has unveiled the latest version of its flagship software, Magics, and announced new partnerships with Ansys, nTop, and EOS at RAPID + TCT 2024. According to the company, these advancements and strategic collaborations are focused on optimizing the design-to-manufacturing process and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with additive manufacturing.
“As additive manufacturing evolves towards new applications and serial production, Materialise is dedicated to enhancing our offerings and forging collaborations that best serve the needs of our users and customers,” said Bryan Crutchfield, Vice President and General Manager, Materialise North America in a press release. “Our efforts aim to advance the industry by tackling challenges in quality and workflow efficiency.”
Magics Updates
Materialise has announced updates to Magics’ functionality and user experience, designed to enable customers to integrate new parts and designs into additive manufacturing, enhancing both efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
The software features a new Lattice Module that also supports beam lattices, intended to help users create complex designs with lighter data sets, for faster, more accurate file processing and preparation.
Another key update to Magics is the enhanced Nester Module, which enables users to place numerous parts on a build platform automatically for multi-part printing and protective packaging customized to the design of each part. According to the company, this allows users to efficiently optimize part distribution, reduce material usage, and provides better protection for parts with the organic sinter box. The Magics user interface also now offers a dark theme option to help reduce visual strain for those working within the software platform for extended periods.
New Materialise Partnerships
Also on display at RAPID + TCT is the previously announced integration of Magics with Ansys simulation software for laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) metal 3D printing. This end-to-end digital solution is designed to enable users to detect weak spots in designs and supports before printing begins. The opportunity to mitigate issues ahead of the printing process improves build success rates, reduces scrap, and saves valuable time and materials.
Materialise has also announced a collaboration with nTop to accelerate the design-to-manufacturing process, enabling the production of complex parts that were previously unprintable. The integration of nTop Core’s implicit modeling API with Materialise’s Magics 3D Print Suite and NxG Build Processor aims to allow a seamless exchange of implicit design files between design and manufacturing teams, eliminating the need for meshing and other intermediate steps. nTop’s modeling kernel and file format reduce the size of traditional CAD files, allowing high-performance designs to be natively processed by Materialise’s Magics for efficient build preparation and slicing.
This collaboration is intended to address the challenges of processing and manufacturing larger, more intricate parts by simplifying file transfers and reducing system crashes.
Finally, Materialise is continuing its collaboration with EOS to reduce inspection costs for metal 3D-printed parts in the aerospace and medical industries. Materialise will integrate multiple EOS process data sources, including optical tomography (OT) and powder bed camera data, with the AI analytics and correlation capabilities of the Materialise Quality & Process Control (QPC) system. This solution aims to enable the extensive inspection of AM process data to detect anomalies, eliminating the costly quality review of parts post-manufacturing.
“Our optical tomography camera is state-of-the-art and a reliable sensor for monitoring the process stability,” said Bernd Biechele, Director of Software Development at EOS. “Thanks to these interfaces, the Materialise QPC system will be able to aggregate this data in combination with other images and sensor data to accelerate quality assurance in additive manufacturing significantly.”
