Granta Design announced the release of Granta MI: Additive Manufacturing, software that resolves the substantial data challenges of developing additively manufactured parts. The new software protects vital IP, accelerates development, and assists qualification and certification.
Applying experience from Granta’s involvement in a number of leading additive manufacturing (AM) projects, MI: Additive Manufacturing incorporates industry practices in managing vital material and process information in this area. It helps protect investment and intellectual property in AM research; build an in-depth knowledge-base for better understanding AM processes; and significantly reduce time-to-market by avoiding wasted effort and gaining valuable insights. In addition, it supports the qualification and certification of additively manufactured parts.
AM work generates huge amounts of data about the structure, properties, and processing of the materials involved. Until now, there has been no easy-to-implement system to capture these data and ensure that it is used effectively across the many disciplines involved: materials suppliers, R&D, part design, simulation, and production. MI: Additive Manufacturing provides a single system, based on the industry-leading Granta MI materials information management software, which captures all relevant data, links it, makes it available to any appropriately-authorized user, and ensures full traceability.
A typical MI: Additive Manufacturing workflow begins with the import of ‘logfiles’ directly from AM machines. The system automatically stores process parameters, extracts logged data for specific builds, links this information to supplier data on the batches of material used to make a part, and captures testing and inspection results. These data can feed into statistical analyses that determine mechanical properties. Properties can be exported to simulation codes and the results can be captured for use in optimizing part design and production. MI: Additive Manufacturing both improves efficiency for many of the individual tasks in Additive Manufacturing research and supports collaboration, sharing knowledge and increasing effectiveness across a whole research program.
At the heart of MI: Additive Manufacturing is the data structure (or ‘schema’) that defines the types of data to be captured in the system, their inter-relationships, and how they might be processed. This technology, embodying industry best practices, is then combined with the MI materials information management tools, which have been proven for the complex management of advanced materials data in dozens of implementations by leading research, design and engineering enterprises worldwide.
One Additive Manufacturing project in which Granta has participated is AMAZE– a multinational collaboration of 28 corporations and research institutions that is developing rapid production of large defect-free additively-manufactured metallic components. Granta technology captures and securely shares knowledge on materials, processes, and properties. This enables efficient comparison of data, improvement of production knowledge, refinement of processes, integration of simulation activities, and improved coordination of the R&D program. Experience such as this has supported development of the new software package
Granta Design
www.grantadesign.com
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense, 3D printing • additive • stereolithography, Automotive, Medical-device manufacture, ENGINEERING SOFTWARE, Rapid prototyping, MORE INDUSTRIES