Welcome to what's new in Siemens NX.
In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the latest
enhancements to additive manufacturing, and to take you through the
demo let's hand over to Ashley.
Hi everyone.
So, uh, so Paul's given me this really great topology optimized part that he
sent over it's for some sort of motor Mount gear, Mount a gearbox Mount, that
sort of thing for, uh, for an automobile.
And so, um, we're going to print this part, using aluminum
and additive manufacturing.
The problem here is.
Additive manufacturing is really accurate these days, but it doesn't always produce
parts that are accurate within tolerance.
And if you want exact surfaces within some really tight tolerances, then you
often need to print your part and then send it on to a downstream machining step.
And that's where we're going to do.
Now to do that, I need to alter this geometry a little bit so that it
has the, uh, the material it needs, uh, for the post print machining, so
that we can machine those parts away and get the exact services we need.
So I've got to print the part.
That's not exactly the part that Paul sent along, but sort of a,
an interim version of the part.
And then when Joe gets the part and does the machining, he will machine it back to
the exact services that Paulwas designing.
Now the great thing about this particular part is that it came out of our new
topology optimization system, where we get actual faces inside the model.
So I've got my selection here, turned to face, and you can see that
straight out of topology optimization.
We've got things like these holes have actual faces and these
planar regions are actual faces.
So that makes it very easy.
For me to go through and do the modifications I need to do to
get this part ready for printing.
If I was doing this with geometry from some other topology optimization system,
I would most likely be just, you know, sort of massaging facets and anybody
who's done that knows how terrible that is, even with a really good system.
So in this case, we're getting really nice, clean geometry out with real faces.
I can work with, to do my job easily and cleanly, and I'll show you how.
First thing I'm going to do is take these holes down here at the bottom.
The row are pretty large and I'm going to shrink them a bit.
Give them just a little bit more meat so that when Joe comes along with his
machining process later and drills those out, he has enough material to work with
to drill it out and get the exact surfaces we need.
So I'm going to go to my offset tool here and I'm just going to select
the face and tell it to automatically find the rest of the faces.
And I'm going to bump those in by about five millimeters.
So basically I just shrunk those holes.
And one step took me about 10 seconds in our new system.
Again, if you do this with facets, this is just amazing compared to that.
These top holes, I'm just going to get rid of, uh, they're small.
And again, we need some meat up here, so I'm going to tell it to loose match those.
It's going to find all 12.
Those are just going to get rid of, we know where they're at.
We know what the diameter needs to be.
I'm just going to fill them in.
And we'll have those ready for machining as well.
The final step is down here on the bottom.
We have these four sort of feet and we want those to be all perfectly planar
so that we Mount this in the car.
It's not going to wobble.
It's not going to torque, um, and have any undue stress put on it.
We want those to be perfectly planar.
So again, we're going to build up those surfaces just a little
bit and machine them back so that they're perfectly planar.
I'll use the move command to do that.
I'm just going to pick each one of these faces here.
And I'm going to move them up by about two mils to, uh, to give us
enough material to machine away, hit.
Okay.
And again, this is all done.
What has it taken me two minutes, maybe to make all of these edits.
If you were doing this with a system where you had to just edit the facets, uh, you
would not be doing this in two minutes.
This would be a project.
So.
Um, you can see how easy it is and in our new system with the new topology
optimization, that the types of geometry returns to get apart prepped for printing.
The next step is to put that into a build tray.
So I'll be back in just a minute and we'll do just that.
So we now have a part a that we've designed for additive manufacturing, we've
taken, we've manipulated the geometry.
Now we need to put it into a build tray and get it set up for printing.
So I'm gonna go over to this part where I have basically an empty part, I'm
going to select my printer, and then I'm going to add the parts to the build tray.
Now, I don't really care where this part comes in.
It's probably going to be thrown out in space, wherever it was, and
it's native assembly at the moment.
Um, But I don't really care because I'm going to take that part and I'm going
to, uh, run it through a new system we have for correcting for distortion.
So one of the real problems with that, Additive manufacturing,
especially in metal.
Additive manufacturing is distortion.
Now you can back and throw a part out of tolerance.
It can even cause failures within the print where you end up with
a really expensive doorstop.
Lots of these things can be mitigated by controlling the distortion that
the part goes through as the little bits of metal and the different layers
of the part are heated up and cooled down within the printing process.
Now, a lot of distortion problems can be alleviated by orienting the
parts in the proper orientation.
And we have a tool, uh, that allows you to do that called the NX build optimizer.
Now in the latest release of NX, we have integrated that tool into the NX system.
And it's up here under the analysis menu.
If you go to more and say, thermal distortion, you can invoke this tool.
Now what this does is you pick your part and the tool will take your part with a
couple of characteristics you handed here.
It will upload your part into the cloud it will run a hundred different
orientations of the part running a simulation for distortion on each
one of those orientations and hand you back the orientation that has the
least amount of distortion possible.
And then you can move on to building, things like support structures and all the
rest of the things you need to print.
But this is one way to really help the initial print quality for
parts, uh, without having to go through some, you know, Uh, trial
and error type, uh, operations that have been done in the past.
So I'm going to go ahead and invoke this system.
It's going to go run and do about a hundred different orientations, and it's
going to come back with an orientation for me, and then we'll do a few more
things to it and get us up for printing.
So we'll be back in just a minute.
So the systems come back, uh, the am build optimizers, come back and
it's given me this orientation as the orientation that it believes will give
me the least amount of distortion.
So now the last thing to do here is to create supports.
Now I've gone over here in my support structure library.
I've got a bunch of supports, uh, created here under this new support
profile for blocks and cones and tree supports and all those sorts of things.
And you can see that reflected over here in the dialogue.
Now I can do automatic supports, uh, which we'll do here in a second.
We also have the option to do manual supports where I
pick the areas that I want.
Uh, The system finds the areas to support.
And I pick which ones I actually want to be supported.
I can do regions only where I make regions that are supported, where I
can do automatic, which is what I'm going to do here, where the system
finds the regions that thinks needs to be supported and supports them.
So I'll select my part.
I will get a preview, um, basically showing me these red areas down here
where the part needs to be supported and I'll say, okay, And the system
going to go through and it's going to create support structures, uh, for my
part, so that when this part is printed, it's not going to sag or distort or
have any effects of gravity on it.
Um, like you might see if you didn't support it properly now it's not going
to maybe support all of those red areas.
It show me it's going to do a further analysis once I hit okay.
Further analysis and the preview.
So I may get a warning here saying that some areas didn't actually
need support just like that.
But now we have a completely supported part.
I can take this.
I can set up my build strategy for my printer, generates the actual print
commands, send those to the printer depending on you know, which printer
type you have all directly inside of NX.
And sometimes depending on the printer again, I can also look at the bill
processor manager and open even slices to understand what each slice, what
each layer of my prints going to look like all from, with inside the system.
No STL files.
And, uh, all completely integrated from beginning to end.
Thanks for joining us.
In the next video, we're going to be taking a look at the latest enhancements
to subtractive manufacturing.
We hope you enjoyed the video and we'll see you in the next one.