Jean Thilmany

PTC launched an update to its computer-aided design software in middle April. Creo 7.0 includes new capabilities to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to designers so they can make simulation part of their daily work. according toBrian Thompson, divisional vice president and general manager, CAD, PTC.

The Creo 7.0 launch follows PTC’s recent acquisition of Onshape, developer of the Onshape Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product development platform, demonstrating the company’s deep commitment to providing innovative technology—via multiple delivery models—to drive business value.

The newest release includes generative design technology from Frusum, a company recently acquired by PTC. Generative design uses AI capabilities to optimize designs. AI is the use of technology and mathematics to create systems that perceive, learn, and act in order to enhance or replace human capabilities-augmented reasoning, said Jesse Coors-Blankenship, a senior vice president of technology at PTC.

Engineers can specify their requirements and goals within the software, including preferred materials and manufacturing processes—and the generative engine will automatically produce a manufacture-ready design as a starting point or as a final solution, Coors-Blankenship said.

The software combines AI with engineering capability and creativity. Parts and products designed through this process are lighter, stronger and use far less materials than those designed using traditional CAD software, Coors-Blankenship said.

Integral to generative design is the goal of augmenting design expertise and capabilities by:

• Optimizing designs for multiple objectives simultaneously and providing a designer with several novel design alternatives, which enables companies to substantially reduce engineering cycles

• Creating constraint-driven design that would not be intuitive to a human or that normally requires deep expertise to optimize (essentially allowing less-experienced designers to create output comparable to more experienced experts).

The Creo 7.0 also includes fluid flow analysis via Creo Simulation Live—a real-time simulation solution that helps designers iterate faster and design with more confidence. This analysis capability expands on PTC’s strategic alliance with Ansys, a maker of simulation and visualization software.

The tool offers real-time guidance for instant feedback on design decisions in the CAD environment. Engineers don’t have to guess at how their design might perform under real-world conditions. They can incorporate as many design changes as needed, confident that they’ve made the best-informed decisions possible, Thompson said.

Creo 7.0 also introduces multibody design, a new set of design tools that enables users to complete many design tasks more efficiently while making their part design easier to manage, understand, and modify. With the multibody design workflows, engineers can separately manage, visualize, and design geometric volumes. This is particularly helpful in the areas of generative design, additive manufacturing, and simulation.

The upgrade to the PTC CAD software also includes enhanced additive manufacturing capabilities, including improved support for Stochastic and custom lattices, giving designers greater flexibility when creating lattice structures.

As with every release, Creo 7.0 provides additional usability and productivity capabilities for all users, including enhanced draft capabilities, improvements to 2D mirror functionality, and multiple user interface improvements to the Sketcher tool.

Creo helps designers build better products faster by facilitating product innovation, fostering design reuse, and replacing assumptions with facts. Designers can go from the earliest phases of product design to a smart, connected product all within a single environment, Thompson said.

 

Canvas GFX, Inc, a provider of technical illustration software has released a new product, Canvas X³ CADComposer, which it describes as a bridge between three-dimensional and two-dimensional illustration. It enhances the core Canvas X³ software with the capability to import and edit 3D CAD files. No need to switch between 2D and 3D software.

The CADComposer now provides an integrated design environment so users can combine all 2D and 3D graphical elements and apply high-end effects within a single document, said Patricia Hume, chief executive officer of Canvas GFX, which makes the tool.

With the tool, technical illustrators can import 40 different 3D file types into the Canvas environment, then position, explode, enhance, and annotate these models for use in a variety of 2D assets. Canvas X³ imports all metadata attached to each model, allowing illustrators to document and reference individual model parts for a range of outputs, including a bill of materials.

By giving illustrators the ability to handle 3D models and metadata directly, Canvas X³ CADComposer frees CAD engineers from having to supply many model views for downstream use, which saves them time and allows them to prioritize other activity. It gives technical illustrators and graphic designers the capability to manipulate 3D CAD models without the need for expensive CAD software.

This allows users to use their source CAD files to produce assembly diagrams, maintenance manuals, repair guides, product sheets, marketing material, and more.

The tool can import a great array of 3D CAD, vector, and raster file formats and export many image and vector formats. Users can work with 0.035-micron accuracy. They can show, hide, or ghost any part in their assembly to better focus the viewer. They can also change colors of assemblies to highlight parts within them.

CAD objects can be edited and re-edited as many times as needed. Users can update documents with new versions or changed views by double-clicking an object. Any rendering can be undone.

They can also automatically label parts in their illustration with CAD metadata to quickly create a bill of materials from CAD data that lists all the parts of the assembly. They can intuitively move parts along their axes for exploded views to help viewers understand how multiple components interconnect.

This is the first Canvas product to build on the firm’s partnership with Dassault Systèmes’s subsidiary Spatial.

Canvas GFX looked to Spatial Corp., a provider of 3D software development toolkits for design, manufacturing, and engineering solutions, for enabling technology for 3D import and model visualization. The engineering team at Canvas GFX selected 3D InterOp, a 3D CAD data translation software development toolkit from Spatial, Hume said.

“3D InterOp enables Canvas X³ users to work with imported 3D data as easily as if it were created natively in the Canvas GFX tool. The result is improved workflow efficiency and enhanced user experience,” added said Vivekan Iyengar, vice president of research and development at Spatial.

Canvas GFX and Spatial Corp announced their partnership in May 2019.

 

 

Stratasys Ltd., a maker of additive manufacturing and 3D printing technology, has appointed a new chief executive officer.

Yoav Zeif will take the helm in middle February, with current Interim Chief Executive Officer Elchanan Jaglom continuing as chairman.

Based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Stratasys, Inc. manufactures rapid prototyping machines that produce physical models from computer designs using fused deposition modeling technology.

At Netafim, a micro-irrigation company, Zeif was president of the americas division and head of product offering and chief commercial officer. He was also senior vice president of products and marketing at Makhteshim (now Adama Ltd.), a global crop-protection company. Since 2018, he’s been a partner in the New York office of McKinsey & Company.

“Stratasys has led the expansion of the 3-D printing industry for more than three decades, but the potential impact of this transformative technology across all industries is just beginning,” Jaglom says. “Yoav brings the strong combination of leadership and global operational experience to fuel our next stage of growth. We are confident that as CEO he will advance our offering and further our vision to reshape the world of design, prototyping and manufacturing.”

Although engineers and designers have benefited greatly from the introduction of computer-aided design, they still need a physical copy in order to check the viability of their ideas, Jaglom says. Designers would spend time making models by hand. With the introduction of rapid prototyping machines, such as those made by Stratasys, CAD designs could be turned into a prototype in a matter of hours, available in a variety of materials.

Fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology relies on a high-speed robotic arm and an extruding head, in effect a glue gun, to spray melted thermoplastic filament. Relying on CAD coding, the gun moves over a platform, plotting small dots of plastic to create a model from the bottom up in a thermally controlled modeling chamber.

Although Stratasys continues to make high-end products, the company has enjoyed success with 3-D printers that cost less than $25,000, making the technology available to a much wider range of customers, including schools. Because the machines require no special venting or chemical post-processing they are also suitable for office use, Jaglom says.

With Zeif’s responsibility spanning dozens of global geographies and multiple lines of business, Zeif delivered growth rates significantly higher than the surrounding market, Jaglom says.

Stratasys pioneered and continues to power the additive manufacturing landscape, enabling companies across virtually all industries to build and improve their businesses through 3D printing technology,” Zeif says. “In particular, thanks to its outstanding innovations and application engineering, it is clear that Stratasys is poised not only to reshape product development and prototyping but also to transform supply chains and manufacturing through efficiency and personalization.”

Stratasys was founded by the husband and wife team of Scott Crump and Lisa Crump. In 1988, Crump decided to make a toy frog for his young daughter using a glue gun loaded with a mixture of polyethylene and candle wax. His idea was to create the shape layer by layer. He then thought of a way to automate the process, spent $10,000 on digital-plotting equipment, and devoted weekend hours to the project.

The couple founded the company in 1988 and in 1989 he patented FDM technology.

 

 

Comsol is set to release Comsol Multiphysics Version 5.5 in November 2019. In this version, the Design Module offers a new sketching tool for easier creation and more versatile parametric control of geometry models, says Daniel Bertilsson, technology manager for mathematics and computer science at Comsol.

Comsol Multiphysics offers tools for engineering modeling, simulation, application, and deployment. It solves for multiple physical effects at the same time.

The company made the update announcement at its annual Comsol Conference held in October in Boston.

New and updated solvers speed a range of simulations. Two new add-on products, the Porous Media Flow Module and the Metal Processing Module, further expand on the product’s suite of multiphysics tools.

The new sketching tool makes it easier to assign dimensions and constraints to planar drawings for 2D modeling and 3D work planes.

“We’ve carefully integrated the new dimensions and constraints tool in the Model Builder so it becomes a natural part of the Comsol Multiphysics workflow,” Bertilsson says. “The new tools for dimensions and constraints can be used together with model parameters in Comsol to drive the simulation, whether for a single run, parametric sweep, or parametric optimization.”

Acoustics Simulations

Another update—new solver technology for acoustics simulations—is a nod to ultrasound technology becoming increasingly important in a range of applications from process engineering and nondestructive testing to consumer electronics.

Other new functionality—based on the time-explicit discontinuous Galerkin method—enables efficient multicore computation of ultrasound propagation in solids and fluids. This includes realistic materials featuring damping and anisotropy. The method also has low-frequency applications, such as in seismology. The multiphysics capability included in this new functionality can seamlessly combine linear elastic wave propagation in a solid and its transition to a fluid, as an acoustic pressure wave, and back again.

The new elastic wave functionality is available for users of the Structural Mechanics Module, MEMS Module, and Acoustics Module. The fluid-structure acoustics coupling is available in the Acoustics Module.

Porous Media Flow Module

This module gives users within industries such as food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical a range of transport analysis capabilities for porous media, trying, and transport in fractures. The flow modules cover linear and nonlinear flow in saturated and variably saturated media with special options for slow and fast porous media flows. The multisphycis simulation capabilities are extensive, with functionality that includes options for calculating effective thermal properties for multicomponent systems, poroelasticity, and transport of chemical species in solid, liquid, and gas phases.

Other highlights of this upgrade include:

• Import and export of the 3D printing and additive manufacturing formats PLY and 3MF.
• Multiple spectral bands for radiation in participating media
• Lumped thermal systems equivalent circuits
• Combined full wave and ray optics simulations
• Minimum-sized standalone application files with Comsol Compiler
• Compressible Euler flow and nonisothermal large eddy simulations
• Editing tools for repair of STL, PLY, and 3MR files

 

Comsol is set to release Comsol Multiphysics Version 5.5 in November 2019. In this version, the Design Module offers a new sketching tool for easier creation and more versatile parametric control of geometry models, says Daniel Bertilsson, technology manager for mathematics and computer science at Comsol.

Comsol Multiphysics offers tools for engineering modeling, simulation, application, and deployment. It solves for multiple physical effects at the same time.

The company made the update announcement at its annual Comsol Conference held in October in Boston.

New and updated solvers speed a range of simulations. Two new add-on products, the Porous Media Flow Module and the Metal Processing Module, further expand on the product’s suite of multiphysics tools.

The new sketching tool makes it easier to assign dimensions and constraints to planar drawings for 2D modeling and 3D work planes.

“We’ve carefully integrated the new dimensions and constraints tool in the Model Builder so it becomes a natural part of the Comsol Multiphysics workflow,” Bertilsson says. “The new tools for dimensions and constraints can be used together with model parameters in Comsol to drive the simulation, whether for a single run, parametric sweep, or parametric optimization.”

Acoustics Simulations

Another update—new solver technology for acoustics simulations—is a nod to ultrasound technology becoming increasingly important in a range of applications from process engineering and nondestructive testing to consumer electronics.

Other new functionality—based on the time-explicit discontinuous Galerkin method—enables efficient multicore computation of ultrasound propagation in solids and fluids. This includes realistic materials featuring damping and anisotropy. The method also has low-frequency applications, such as in seismology. The multiphysics capability included in this new functionality can seamlessly combine linear elastic wave propagation in a solid and its transition to a fluid, as an acoustic pressure wave, and back again.

The new elastic wave functionality is available for users of the Structural Mechanics Module, MEMS Module, and Acoustics Module. The fluid-structure acoustics coupling is available in the Acoustics Module.

Porous Media Flow Module

This module gives users within industries such as food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical a range of transport analysis capabilities for porous media, trying, and transport in fractures. The flow modules cover linear and nonlinear flow in saturated and variably saturated media with special options for slow and fast porous media flows. The multisphycis simulation capabilities are extensive, with functionality that includes options for calculating effective thermal properties for multicomponent systems, poroelasticity, and transport of chemical species in solid, liquid, and gas phases.

Other highlights of this upgrade include:

• Import and export of the 3D printing and additive manufacturing formats PLY and 3MF.
• Multiple spectral bands for radiation in participating media
• Lumped thermal systems equivalent circuits
• Combined full wave and ray optics simulations
• Minimum-sized standalone application files with Comsol Compiler
• Compressible Euler flow and nonisothermal large eddy simulations
• Editing tools for repair of STL, PLY, and 3MR files

The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software has a new home in 2019. Just in time for its 20th anniversary, the even will move from Scottsdale, Ariz., to Menlo Park, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley.

The conference is think-tank event where those involved with engineering technology industry come together to discuss best practices, share ideas for managing change, and find strategies to achieve financial success. This year, the event takes place April 7 to 9.

It’s relocation is obviously no accident.

“With this move, we’re showing that engineering software is moving into the future of more high technology products,” said Jim Brown, president of engineering consulting firm Tech-Clarity and a member of the COFES Institute board of directors. The institute provides leadership for COFES.

The meeting this year includes subjects like CAD and PLM software, but also addresses new methods of engineering design as well as new technologies making their way into the engineering realm.

“There’s so much convergence of new technologies like artificial intelligence, IoT, connected products and 3D printing  that are starting to come into the design world for things like generative design,” Brown said. “It’s kind of up to as the engineering software community to come together as users of the software and as the academics and industry thought leaders and software vendors to put our heads together to figure out how we can do more with these technologies.”

To illustrate the changes the engineering field has recently experienced, Brown pointed to the shift from products, like automobiles, that had previously been strictly mechanical in nature, to items that now commonly include mechanical, electrical, and even software systems.

“Now a car is trying to schedule your service appointments and soon as part of smart city initiatives it will be communicating with other cars and with traffic lights,” Brown said. “Our tools, our mindsets have to change. The engineering software community is excited for these changes, but we need to determine how to react to them and how to support them.”

For nearly two decades, COFES had been owned and run by Cyon Research. It recently moved to operating as a nonprofit.

Last week, conference leaders announced that Microsoft will deliver a keynote on the COFES 2019 theme of technology convergence—the pairing of two or more technologies in a single device–from a software perspective.

The trend of convergence creates new challenges and opportunities for any company developing software solutions for design and manufacturing.

Microsoft leaders will share their insights regarding the possibilities the cloud can bring to companies for competitive advantages when it comes to software solutions for design and manufacturing, said Diego Tamburini, Microsoft principal industry lead, cloud for engineering and manufacturing

The need to effectively design in this new reality will become increasingly more important, he said. While companies are dealing with convergence with brute force, the software tools do not exist yet to manage the expanded, evolving design process, he added.

Microsoft’s keynote is titled “What Does the Manufacturer of the Future Look Like? A Microsoft Perspective.”

Keeping up with the COFES theme of convergence, Microsoft will share thought leadership in the areas of connected products, connected services, factory of the future, intelligent supply chains, and the strategic trends that Microsoft is witnessing and their vision of a cloud-enabled marketplace of solutions enabling best-in-class solutions that work together, Tamburini said.