2 minute read
Technology Forward
The data challenge in additive manufacturing
Soon, the size of a typical 3D print data file will, on average, be about 27 times larger than a typical file today, notes Harshil Goel, CEO and Founder of Dyndrite.
The additive industry is reaching, some would say has reached, a point where further productivity advances are delayed because of software. People are designing products they can’t manufacture, notes Goel, because of the data problem. Design programs like traditional CAD and topology optimization won’t enable faster builds, because the key issue is the compute problem. Designs must be simplified to print because of the time it takes to compute them for additive processes.
Part of the problem is due to the growing size of the build beds of 3D printing/Additive manufacturing systems. BigRep, Cincinnati Inc., 3D Platform, among others, all make machines with build platforms that can handle parts that are feet long, wide, or tall.
Another issue is that additive resolutions are increasing. Which means the amount of metadata you need to supply to the printer to properly print the files is also increasing.
And consider the time it takes to load a file into a 3D printing system. Assume it takes roughly 15 minutes. Say you have ten people do this four times a day, at an overhead cost of roughly $100 to $200 each time. That comes out to about $20,000 a week to load files. Additive is advancing to the point where operational costs play a bigger role in adoption than initial purchase costs.
A system that is compute optimized could make it easier to accelerate the adoption of additive for production application, argues Goel.
Goel notes that 3DP/AM software has not kept up with developments in additive technology. This situation means additive machines can print faster than designers can prepare files. With unlimited complexity, on demand operation, high mix, high volume—designs are becoming compute limited.
One solution may be to follow what dot matrix printers did years ago; develop an interpreted language that can compute data a printer needs on the fly. Dot matrix printers had postscript. Additive vendors are looking at a digital front end as a solution for today.
A digital front end would include software or firmware. It would serve as the number crunching unit that feeds data to the machine.
A digital front end can be used to modify a print in real time. It would receive data from various sensors and cameras on the printer and, through its software, compute changes if necessary to ensure a quality build.
As Goel pointed out, it will be important to shift away from mesh files as they require manual intervention to alter a design.
“There are different ways to do that,” he notes. “By upscaling the compute and improving the fidelity of the data coming in, namely the CAD data, not the mesh file, you can dramatically, in my opinion, transform the workflow and basically help automate that part of additive manufacturing and make it production ready.”
Various 3D printing programs, like 3MF and .STL, will no longer be needed. Printing in a production environment will use CAD data directly, through the digital front end.
Vendors have focused on additive hardware. Now it’s time to work on software. DW
Leslie Langnau llangnau@wtwhmedia.com
On Twitter @ DW_3Dprinting
