Jean Thilmany

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.

The Khronos Group of Beaverton, Ore., an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies that come together to create advanced acceleration standards, has released the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.

The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum.

The OpenXR 0.90 provisional release specifies a cross-platform application programming interface (API) that enables XR hardware platform vendors to expose the functionality of their runtime systems. By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application lifecycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are frustratingly different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort—significantly reducing industry fragmentation, said Brent Insko, lead VR architect at Intel and the OpenXR working group chair.

The Khronos OpenXR working group was formed in early 2017 with the support and participation of leading XR companies. Throughout the development of the specification, multiple Khronos members have been developing independent implementations to ensure a robust and complete specification. Many of these implementations are becoming available for developers to evaluate including the Monado OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora, and the OpenXR runtime for Windows mixed reality headsets from Microsoft. Also, the Unreal Engine from Epic plans to continue to support OpenXR.

“OpenXR seeks to simplify AR/VR software development, enabling applications to reach a wider array of hardware platforms without having to port or re-write their code and subsequently allowing platform vendors supporting OpenXR access to more applications,” Insko said “The OpenXR provisional specification—together with the runtimes publicly available at launch and coming in the next few weeks—will enable hands-on, cross-platform testing by application and engine developers.

“The working group welcomes developer feedback to ensure an OpenXR 1.0 specification that truly meets the needs of the XR industry,” he said.

Added Nandan Nayampally, vice president and general manager, client line of business at the semiconductor and software company Arm:

“It is significant when so many key players in the industry come together to create an open standard like OpenXR. We look forward to seeing adoption of the new standard, and believe that reducing barriers for cross-platform XR applications accelerates growth, innovation, and diversity in the VR and AR industry.”

Philippe Kalaf, chief executive officer at Collabora said his company was dedicated to royalty-free open standards and open source technologies. He also spoke about Monado, an open-source implementation of the OpenXR spec.

“Monado is an open-source project and codebase to harness and focus wider community effort around XR technologies,” he said. “Collabora plans to provide the technical foundation and industry leadership to accelerate the development and deployment of XR technologies on Linux while providing XR device vendors the choice to use and contribute to a Linux-based platform for their XR products.”

Microsoft also offered feedback on the new standard.

“Microsoft believes that for mixed reality to thrive, it must be open for everyone: open stores, open browsers and open developer platforms. We’re dedicated to supporting the launch of OpenXR this year on Windows Mixed Reality and HoloLens 2,” said Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft.

The Khronos Group is an open industry consortium of over 140 leading hardware and software companies creating advanced, royalty-free, acceleration standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, vision and machine learning. Khronos standards include Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC, WebGL, SPIR-V, OpenCL, SYCL, OpenVX, NNEF, COLLADA, OpenXR and glTF.

Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications and to vote at various stages before public deployment. They are able to accelerate the delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts.

Arvizio Inc. is expanding its software to accommodate many types of headsets.

The Canadian company’s MR Studio is used for 3D visualization and collaboration in augmented, virtual and mixed reality. It can be used for design reviews, marketing demonstrations, new project pursuit, remote expert assistance and training across industries including architecture, engineering and construction; industrial engineering; energy and mining.

The company recently announced the expansion of their MR Studio mixed reality software platform to include Magic Leap One and virtual reality headsets in addition to new features for Microsoft HoloLens.

“Customers require a flexible platform that offers a common experience across multiple types of augmented, mixed and virtual reality devices,” says John Reeves the company’s chief executive officer. “We’re excited to announce that MR Studio supports an expanding number of artificial reality, virtual reality and mixed reality devices for cross platform, multi-user, collaborative experiences.”

MR Studio is an enterprise level solution designed to provide multi-user and multi-site mixed reality experiences for working with 3D CAD or BIM models and real-world 3D LiDAR scans.

Architecture, engineering and construction firms as well as those in the energy, engineering and mining industries can now combine mixed reality and fully immersive VR experiences while sharing design reviews, client walk-through experiences and visualize shared 3D content both locally and across locations, according to Reeves .

The Arvizio platform allows all aspects of collaboration, model mark up, model optimization and multi-user presentation to be operated from MRS Director, an PC-based client application that manages and coordinates the entire workflow. MRS Director is available as a local edition for shared experiences at a single site or enterprise edition for collaboration across multiple locations.

MRS Director allows a wide range of 3D data formats such as CAD models, BIM models (including a Revit plugin) and LiDAR scans to be optimized for visualization on MR devices and headsets. 3D models may be viewed at table top size or walked through at life size. Virtual meeting collaboration tools allow the experience to be synchronized for both local and remote participants. Annotation and real-world alignment tools create unique shared experiences among members of the team, the customers and stakeholders.

MR Studio users can:

• Visualize and share large, complex 3D models and point clouds
• Walk through life-size virtual buildings and other large-scale CAD models
• View and share engineering documents associated with the model
• Collaboratively communicate in real time among multiple users across locations

A key aspect of the software is no software programming is required, allowing users to import, optimize and share complex models from Revit, LiDAR systems and most popular CAD packages. Models are prepared for XR experiences using a flexible GUI interface which allows models to be optimized, annotated, aligned, clipped and linked with project related documents and images. The prepared models may then be shared among multiple users simultaneously.

In addition to expanding device support, the company is also launching version 3.0 of their MR Studio platform with new and enhanced features. Associated with the launch, Arvizio will be offering a Mixed Reality Innovators Pack, which offers an introduction to MR Studio and support for up to five devices utilizing a local computer.

MR Studio is available in two tiers: The local edition provides the ability to walk through designs at life size, align models with the real world for AR and MR digital twin scenarios and synchronize the view of multiple participants at a single location while the enterprise edition extends this set of capabilities to conduct virtual design reviews with multiple participants across locations.