Additive manufacturing makes designing a lattice structure for a bracket possible. However, does it have a chance of success? Simulation can tell you.
Traditional prototype techniques take weeks and cost a considerable amount of a product development budget.
It’s true that additive manufacturing has reduced the time and cost to build prototypes. However, the near-instant simulation capabilities of ANSYS Discovery Live can speed up prototyping labs even more.
“Traditional simulation tools are hard to use, take a long time to produce results and are too expensive to be used on a regular basis,” says Tejas Rao, manager of ANSYS’ Discovery Live Technical Team.
“Discovery Live, however, offers instantaneous real-time simulation in an extremely easy-to-use multiphysics interface,” Rao adds. “It also includes integrated geometry manipulation. This means you can do simulation on your own in seconds.”
So how can Discovery Live help a prototyping lab?
Imagine your design team sends you five designs to print. Printing all five is a waste. Instead, import the designs into Discovery Live. In seconds, you can narrow down which designs are worthy of prototyping.
Tip: Test Lattice Structures in Simulation before Additive Manufacturing
Simulation of this lattice part gives engineers an idea how it will perform before printing and prototyping it.
Additive manufacturing makes it possible to drastically reduce a product’s weight by creating unique shapes and forms.
Optimizing these designs through lattice structures — and subsequent testing of their performance — is an important step that is often done by trial and error.
Assessing a lattice’s performance using traditional simulation takes a long time to set up and solve. Additionally, spending time printing models with lattice structures without having an idea of the design’s performance and likelihood of success could be a waste of time.
Alternatively, simulating a model containing a lattice using Discovery live will quickly give you an idea of how it will perform. “The goal here isn’t the highest accuracy possible,” says Rao. “The goal here is to understand the basic flow field.”
Understanding that flow field will help the prototyping lab assess the likelihood of success for a design before they print the prototype. They can then concentrate on printing the lattices they know have a chance of success.
Watch ANSYS Discovery Live for Additive Manufacturing Applications to learn more ways to accelerate your prototyping using simulation software and PNY’s NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPU).
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