Material Selection

So you’ve identified a part you think is suitable for additive manufacturing. Which material will you use to realize the product vision? If you are not planning to use the previously approved material, know that certain materials are not readily available for additive applications. Whether or not your material is available for additive fabrication, is it truly the best choice for the application? Given that you are considering a process change, why not also certify your production around a modern material perfect for the task at hand?

Topological Optimization

If you have an existing product design—whether in production or in a concept stage—you can share it with our design consulting team. From there, we will develop an understanding of the part's current function, desired characteristics, and any other key considerations that may factor into our design thinking such as the intended material or total volume of parts anticipated. This will, in turn, allow us to assess which manufacturing process will be optimal for your particular program and use the appropriate design rules to quickly and effectively arrive at a viable design for that material-process combination. We will then use the combination of our design team's expertise and our various software tools to drive toward design concepts that holistically address the goals you have set out.

Generative Design

Generative design describes the process of feeding specific parameters into advanced software and allowing the software to algorithmically create design options based on those inputs. This operation optimizes for any number of performance characteristics such as weight, strength, or a target density. This is how generative gets its name; the design software literally generates the designs from the ground up. Generative design can also be described as parametric design, referencing the parameters input into the software.

While the software can create a wide variety of concepts, these designs are often extraordinarily complex, and sometimes entirely outside the bounds of practical manufacturability. This is where our expertise truly kicks in. Our Design Consulting goes beyond simply being able to create a wide variety of prospective design options, we apply practical knowledge of parts manufacturing across a wide variety of technologies to algorithm-generated designs and turn them into a part optimized for manufacture with a specific process and material. Often the manufacturing process of choice is one of our various additive-manufacturing technologies and CNC machining and casting can also be viable options.