Introduction to End-to-End Additive Manufacturing Workflow using Netfabb for DMLS

KEVIN: Can you hear me? Yeah. OK, it's working now. All right, so now we're going to do the setting for tesselization when you bring in your parts. I just want to make sure that we're put it on medium accuracy. When we bring in parts, I just file step files, we're making a setting for that.

So we'll save that, and then I can just add my part. This is the workspace for the SLM 125 machine you see here. I'm going to go ahead and add this part now. We're going to add an IGES file. But just wanted to show you this real quick. You can bring in a bunch of different native CAD files, such as CATIA, SolidWorks, ProE files, Rhino, just to name a few. But we're going to go ahead and we're going to bring in the IGES file here.

All right, we're also going to scale this part down. We just right-click on it again, scale. And I'm going to scale to half size to a 0.5, and that'll scale on all the XYZ. So we have a part here. As Jim said, this was the first step of that three-step process.

This is [INAUDIBLE] a part. We fixed it when we brought it in. We tesselized it on the fly. And at this point, we want to orientate that part. We have this orientation part, a button here where you can see some different orientations and get previews of this part before we go ahead and support it.

Now, the parameters that are important are here on the right. You have your critical angle, 40 degrees-- so 40 degrees on the horizontal. Anything below 40 degrees will be supported. We have a 20 degree here, meaning it's going to give me a bunch of orientations 20 degrees apart.

So I'm going to hit Search Orientations, and then it's going to show me a list where I can go through and make some choices of how I want to orientate this part. And we'll go through that here, when this is done. This is actually really good for people that are new to supporting parts to kind of get an idea before you go and slice it and everything.

So you get right here-- you get this list, and you can go through and pick-- for example, maybe I want to hit this height one here. And I go, OK, what's the lowest height? It will throw it down in the Z. What's the highest one? We have rankings here.

But what we're concerned about is support volume. I want to use the least amount of support. So I'm going to click this and it's going to drop here. And let's get some other ones in here. So basically, you can click through these, but I'm going to pick this one because it has the least amount of support.

Make sure that's the right one. Yes it is. I'm going to hit OK, and what that does is it actually orientates the part in your workspace. So at this point, I want to actually set up my parameters for this SLM machine, so I'm going to go here and we can pick materials for the SLM machine. We have the library materials to pick through.

I'm going to pick this aluminum 50-micron, select that. We're going to say, hey, what build strategy are we using? We're going to do a solid part. So at this point, I want to go ahead and create the supports. So I'm going to go ahead and create supports here, and it's going to bring up a way to bring up a support script.

So we can automate the supporting of this part. We have scripts, and you can actually customize scripts. And what I'm going to do is show you. So if you get back and you want to do this, you can go to More Actions here and you can import a script.

So if I bring in a script, I make a duplicate, and I make changes, I can save that and then have that as my script for the next time I bring up a part-- it'll have the parameters I want and the kind of supports I want. So I'm going to go ahead and pick this. Now it's here.

We just go to our Support Scripts tab, and we're going to hit Execute, and it's going to automatically create your supports for you. And then we're going to-- we used the least amount of supports, so we're going to go in here and we're going to do some advanced editing. I'm going to do a few edits on this part just to give an idea of some of the things you can change.

For example, this support here, if I use my left mouse button here, you can highlight its support. And we would not want to build this in metal and have this support going into this hole here. It would be hard to cut off. It would mar the surface. So I can easily select the support.

And I can go to my Edit tab here, and these are all the parameters that you can change. I'm not going to open them all up, but I'll just go to the bottom one here. And it's a nice tool to use. It brings up this way to angle and move supports away from a part or into a part.

It brings up these part placement arrows. And I can easily just rotate this. I can hold down my left mouse button. I can just drag the support right off there, right to the platen. So now I have that hole. It's nice and easy to clean up. And then we'll go ahead and move some other supports here, show you some other things.

We had this support here. This I would not want to build. I would not want a skinny support going down to the platen here. So I can easily select this one. And I can go back to my Edit tab again and hit Yes, and then I can just move that support into the part by left mouse button-- holding it down, and just move it right into the part, and it gets rid of that long skinny structure there.

And we'll go ahead and we'll show you this one here-- two more to do-- three more here. Also we can make this a little easier too. We got this support here in this cavity here. It'll mar your surface. It'll be hard to cut off. And we have all the support in this hole.

So I want to select that. And I'm going to do the same thing I did earlier. I'm just going to select angle block support and I'm going to move that support into there. And it does that. So we clean it up, it will make it a little easier to clean up.

And then also we have ways to stretch out and make your supports longer here by just grabbing it in here. So if I go here, if you see this support here, I would like to add a few-- a little more support here on this opening here. So I'm just going to go to a bottom view here, show you here.

We have these nodes. This is just a visual [INAUDIBLE] support these blue dots. These are ways of moving supports. So I'm going to select that support, and then we can just-- oops, let me-- yeah, we can just move that. Sometimes you have to wait here. I think I double-clicked on that. Hold on. I'll give it a second here.

Yeah, let that roll for a minute. I double-clicked on that. Sorry about that. OK, there we go. So I can stretch out that support there. And I can also thicken it up too here by going here and just sliding it down here. See how we thickened that up, we made a stronger support to hold that area?

And I also want to show you one more advanced supporting technique here. So we have this area here. I would like a support in here. And we have a way to mark an area-- a cluster is what they call it where calm market area, and then you can rerun a script on that marked area.

And we do that by going up here. We'll get our mark cluster arrow, and what it does is it brings up this green circle that I can make bigger or smaller, hitting my middle mouse button and my control button. And I could just mark an area on this part.

And what you're seeing in the red is the critical area, so it's basically saying that's all going to be supported. And the yellow's just a little buffer that it may put some support in there to make sure it's good enough there. And then you right-click. Turns to purple.

And we're going to go to Create Script Action Support on the cluster. So what I'm saying is I'm going to go pick a script for my supports here. And it created. So that's my editing for supports here that I wanted to show. So at this point, we're going to hit Apply Supports. I'm satisfied with this.

So at this point, I want to actually go and slice this part. And I can just easily slice apart by grabbing this part up here and dragging it to our slice folder. Remember, we did it at 50 microns. So I'm going to hit start. Basically what this is doing is slicing that part into your 2D layers stacked up.

And you can easily slide through this from the bottom going up to the top of the part. You can also hit animate and just see it actually trace how it's going about tracing your part here. But I'm going to stop this. So that's slicing.

And if you remember what Jim said, the three steps-- model prep, bill prep, and build-- we're at the build stage now, the third step. So what we want to actually do is go to our slice folder, and we want to send that file to our SLM machine. So we're going to select those two and we're going to export out.

And what's important about this is we have the SLM machine, and we're going to be able to send a dot SLM file to that machine. The big takeaway from this is you'd be able to-- you're setting up your whole build for that machine within Netfabb.

And you'd be able to do that for EOS machines, Renishaw machines, and the professional 3D printers out there. You don't have to open up their software. So you're not opening up multiple softwares to get to the bottom line build file, the dot SLM file.

So I would pick SLM alarm. It takes a support file and par file, makes it into one file that you would send to your machine. Open up your machine. Bring that build in. Start your machine. So that's basically the direct metal laser sintering workflow.

And Edgar's going to show the simulation of this part a little bit, but I do want to touch on one more thing here real quick. This is an optimized part already, but I want to show you another way of optimizing a part. So I'm going to minimize this. I'm going to bring up a part here.

And we have a quick way of-- a good application of lightweighting a part. This is a solid part, and I want to make this optimized with a lattice structure in it. So I'm going to bring this part in and quickly show this before we get to Edgar. So if I go to Modify here, I can quickly put a lattice inside this part.

As you can see here, on the right, we have a bunch of lattices in our library you can pick from. I'm going to quickly pick this one, and we're going to edit the cell. Just remember this is a uniform lattice through the part. We've handled the part out. We're going to put a uniform lattice in there, and then I'm going to hit Calculate.

And so basically, the benefits of this is you're lightweighting a part, you're saving on material, you're saving on build time, because that laser doesn't have to trace as much surface area. So what's happening right now? It's actually hollowing that part out, the 2 millimeter wall thickness that I put on here.

And these are editable parameters you see her on the right. We can make the latest different sizes, if we need to. It'll usually give you a nice average here. But just keep in mind that's uniform latticing. We have other ways of doing it, but I just wanted to show you this before we got into simulation a lightweighting of a part-- latticing.

And of course, you make a part like that, it's solid. You have to be able to get that power. Or even if you're making this in-- rather than SLA machine, you got to get that resin out of there, so we have to pop a hole in it. And this wizard-based thing here, you can just pop a hole in it. And you can change the size of that.

I'm going to hit Calculate. It's going to pop a hole in there. We're going to hit Apply. Remove old part. We can keep the old part in there, if we want. It'd just keep it in your parts tree here. And we can now-- I'll show you here the lattice that we created here.

Clip plane's a real nice to use to look inside of a part. By sliding this slider here, I can look on the inside of the part, left or right here. So you see this lattice that we have created, we've lightweighted-- oops, sorry. Picked the wrong one.

We created this lattice in here. That'll be self-supporting. It's on an angle there. Lightweighted the part, so you would definitely save on material and scan time. So let me minimize this and bring back to the PowerPoint. I want to just rehash what we've seen here today.

So again, Jim showed you the three steps, and basically that's the three steps we did with the workflow for the direct metal laser sintering here. We started off, we brought in a workspace. We brought in a part that we tessellated on the fly, so we can control the tessellation of the part coming in.

We orientated the part and looked at some scenarios in the orientation. And then we actually supported the part with a script that we made. So you can custom make your own supports. We did some advanced editing, showed you a few things there. You spend all this money on this metal machine-- $1 million, $500,000-- you want to make sure that part's going to build. So that's why we have a solution and simulation that Edgar's going to talk about. And also he's going to talk about how you can mitigate through some feedback through simulation to make sure that your parts actually build. So I will pass it off to Edgar now. Thanks for your time.

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Thank you very much. Can everyone hear me? OK, great. Thank you, Kevin. My name is Edgar Aguirre. I'm also a technical sales specialist for the AM team here at Netfabb. And what I plan to cover in the next two points would be looking at our AM simulation, and also using the results from that and feeding them back into that workspace that we were-- that Kevin had just set up for us.

So if we go here, he's already set up this-- the part with it supports. And from here, we can step into the simulation process. So for direct metal laser sintering process, there are lots of common failure modes that happen during this process. You have distortion, you have support failures-- the stresses that are involved in this type of process can rip supports away from the part that is being built.

The distortions in the Z direction can also cause recoder a blade interferences. So the blade that coats another layer of powder can collide into the part, if it distorts too much. There are also other problems like lack of fusion and hotspots.

So what Netfabb provides? It provides feedback to the users to bring the part in, simulate it, and get results back. You'll see distortions at different steps during the process, the simulation process. You'll see areas where there will be support failures, areas where there may not be recorder blade interferences, and it will look at hotspots and lack of fusions.

While we go through the simulation process, I will come back and describe what this PRM file generation is. But before I do that, let me start the simulation process. So from the point that Kevin left us at, I can go down to the bottom here and start the-- start building simulation.

So I just enter the name of the file that I want to use, because it's generating a 3MF file. And this 3MF file has information that the simulation will interrogate. So just call it AGD Final, and then go ahead and save it. So that's a 3MF file.

Then I just start the-- I go into the simulation utility. The simulation utility is the user interface that allows you just set up your simulation-- the parameters for this simulation setup. It knows that I am using SLM 125. The dimensions the build plate is correct. It brings in the model and it also brings in the supports.

As you see the interface here, you start from the whole the Home tab, and then you have the icons that go from left to right. So I'll describe each of the icons and what each one-- what are you changing with each of the icons. The first icon is the material properties. These are the material properties that are available to you as a user to use. And you can actually create your own material properties, if you don't see the materials that we have in our database.

Most of these have been validated, like [INAUDIBLE]. The [INAUDIBLE] were actually validated in America Makes project that our simulation solution was involved in. And I think the sponsors was GE and UTRC, and they validated these materials. We validated the other materials, like titanium, aluminum. But you can actually create your own materials in this interface.

The next one is the process parameters. Let's go ahead and turn that on. You need a process parameter to start a simulation. And I'll describe what this process parameter is while it goes through the simulation process. And each PRM file has-- is associated with a certain material and a process parameters. So as long as that hasn't changed, you can-- we use a PRM file over and over again.

But if your process parameters are different than the one you see here, you'll go ahead and add a new PRM file, you enter the process parameters for that machine, and you enter the material, and you get that PRM process started. Again, I will describe what PRM means or that entails.

Then you have the machine boundary conditions. You have the-- which machine we're using. And you can actually add PRM files to different sections of your build, if you want. In this case, I'm going to keep the PRM file uniform between the part and the supports.

Then you have your build plate boundary conditions. You need to know the type of material you're going to use for your build plate and the powder you're going to use. In this case, it's going to be aluminum, and my build plate will be the same. So I just click on the deposition material, and the build plate will be the same. But I can also decide that I might want to use a different material for the build plate. But in this case, it's going to be the same.

What's the heating temperature for the build plate? We can have it controlled at 30 C throughout the whole build process. And then at the very bottom, I'm going to assume that the boundary conditions for the build plate is fixed, when you remove the part from the build plate.

You can assume this if your part is very small and your build plate is very large. Your build plate's really not going to distort. But if you want-- if you have a large part that covers the whole build plate, that I recommend that you simulate the bolt release, because it will actually take into account any distortion that happens with the build plate, as well.

So in this case, the part is relatively small to the build plate, so I'll keep it fixed to the bottom. And you can change the size of the build plate, if you need to. Some machines you're actually machining off the build plate every so often, so that might change. So you might want to change the dimensions of the build plate.

In a simulation, you can also add heat treatment to the part as it's being removed from the machine, and you can do heat treatment to simulate the relief of the stress. And you can add that into your simulation, as well. Solver settings are the-- this is going to be a thermal mechanical simulation. You can do either or, but in this case, we'll do both.

Deposition multiplier is set to 1. If you are building four parts that are the same, but you only want to simulate one part, you could set the deposition multiplier to 4, meaning that it will take into account the time it takes to print the other three layers of the same part and then come back to the original layer. So it just gives you an extra timestamp to account for the cooling of that one layer.

The recorder tolerance is set here. Here it indicates that, if the part exceeds 20% into the next layer, it will trigger a recorder blade interference. So you could set this depending on how comfortable you are and how much distortion is going on into the next layer. If you have a large part, you can stop that simulation when it actually encounters the first recorder blade interference.

So the next one is the support failure. I'm going to set it to 90 megapascals. So this is the amount of force that it would take to rip the supports from the part and the build plate. So you could set a number for that, and if it exceeds that, it will actually give you an error.

And then the results-- you can actually select the stresses you want to see after the simulation. You can also set plasticity. That's an extra step that is added after the part has been built. And the next one is mesh settings. So here is how accurate you want your mesh to be and how fast you want your simulation to run.

I'm going to set this to 2 millimeters, but usually you use the-- if you know the minimum feature of your part, you set it here. I'll set it to 2 for now, and this will give you your mesh settings as well as how fast-- how accurate you want your simulation to be.

The next one is the mesh preview. Here it's going ask me to actually enter a name for my project-- so AGD_Final. Go ahead and save that. It's going to remesh the part, so you can see how the mesh is at the start of the simulation.

When that's done, you can go and interrogate your mesh. When you enter the minimum feature size, it will guarantee that you'll have at least two beams. If you notice that there are actually nodes here. The size of the nodes-- you need at least two nodes per minimum feature size.

In this case, this-- I'm setting it very coarse. So I probably need to go back. I'm going to go to the Results tab-- the View tab, and go to the clipping plane here. So here there's a normal to the clip that I'm making, and I can use it-- I can move along that normal.

So if I interrogate this mesh, I'm seeing that there's only one node per this wall here. So I probably need to go back and adjust my resolution. In this case, I'm going to leave it the way it is just so I can get through the simulation within the half hour that I have.

So now that I've set this, I go back to my Home tab, and the next thing I do is solve. I'm going to solve locally, but you have also option of solving on the cloud, as well. So here I'm going to go ahead and hit the Solve button.

It checks for my memory, because right now, this is a small part. I'm running it on my laptop-- Kevin's laptop-- and it should run within about a few minutes for this part. You can also simulate a full build plate, as well.

So here is my job manager. I also can view my logs too. So there's a thermal and mechanical output, and I can interrogate this information and see if there's any errors in my mechanical log file. While that's running, I'm going to go back to my presentation and describe that PRM file that I talked about.

The thermomechanical modeling has been known since the '70s and '80s, especially in the welding world. There's a heat transfer with a thermal history that gets placed into a mechanical response, and then you get an output from that. And this process has been known.

What makes our solver very unique is that the development team has created a very unique solution to get this stimulation times down by as fast as about 1,000 times faster than most general solvers. And even with this improvement, they decided to even improve this process even further.

And this is called the PRM generation. So it's looking at a small sample of material, and it's taking into account for the process parameters, as well as the temperature-dependent properties of this material. And it's doing a small-scale simulation. So it's looking at the thermomechanical response at each layer for this part.

So once that PRM generation is finished, then it will apply it to the large scale. So you'll notice that the way the part was meshed, it actually will adapt the mesh throughout the simulation process.

Small areas that really need the simulation, their mesh will be very small. Other areas, they'll be large. So it's an adaptive mesh. And a full build plate like this can take-- it will take four hours to simulate using a 14-core CPU processor.

And a part like this in real life would take about a day or day and a half to build. So you're getting results upfront faster than you can print. So here's another part that this is probably the same one or a different part here. So this took about 3 and 1/2 hours with a 20-core processor.

So let's go back to our simulation. And you can see I've got the result up here. So you'll see on the left, there's a project folder. And under the results, you can interrogate the distortion here. This is the first one that comes up. And you can run the distortion at the different layers and see how this distortion behaves throughout the simulation process.

So as it goes up, then at the very bottom, you'll see a green line, and that's your timestamp. So if I stop this simulation and just go back one timestamp, that's when-- let's go back here. This is when it's been cooled down and the part is still on the build plate.

So the next timestamp after that is going to be when I remove the part from the build plate, and the next one is when I remove the supports from the part. So throughout this process, you're seeing how the distortion is happening.

What are the results? Like I said, we can look at recorder blade interference here. Let's go back and see throughout the build process where errors-- where there might be recorder blade interference.

There's the structure type here. As you could see, anything in red that you might see would be areas that might have support failures. [INAUDIBLE] could Since this part is probably distorting in the Z direction, you will have support failures in these areas.

And of course, there are also areas-- this is for [INAUDIBLE]. Let's go back here. This is [INAUDIBLE] fusion and also hotspots. And of course, you can also interrogate the other information that you'll get from this user interface, like the other stresses like von Mises stresses.

So now that you've seen, this I'm going to go ahead and save this project. So I'm going to bring the results back into the build space that we were looking at here. I'm going to cancel this out. So I'd really like to see how that information-- I want to overlay that information over this part.

So the next thing I do is I go into the load simulation results, and I go into the project file that I saved, into the-- and load the mechanical response. Here, again, I have the simulation results right next to my build plate, so I can interrogate-- just like I did with our other interface, I can interrogate it here and look at the different timestamps.

I can also look at this placement in a certain direction-- X, Y, or Z only. I can also look at these stresses. Let's go back. But let's go back to displacement. Now I want to overlay this with my original part. So at the very bottom, you'll see a display for supports editing.

So if I click on that, it tells me which workspace I want to use, and then it will load the results right-- let's go turn that off here. It will load the results overlaid on the original part. So if I go to my View tab in the support module and just turn on the build plate, the part, and the supports, I can go ahead and look at areas where I might need to increase my supports.

And I could go ahead and do a displacement here. So I can scale the displacement and see where the distortion is happening. So again, I would probably need to solidify their supports on this end. So there's the instant feedback that you get, when you're bringing the results back into your workspace.

What else can you do? If you go back to your-- into the Netfabb simulation results-- and then there's another button at the very bottom. It says Compensated Part Geometry. This is where you can actually enter, create a compensated geometry, and what you're doing is it's actually trying to mitigate that distortion by creating a compensated geometry.

Well, if you print this geometry, it should build into the original part. It will try to mitigate that distortion. Right now, I have said it 0.75. I have the mesh settings set here, and I've selected which build space I want to put it in-- or workspace, sorry.

So now that that's being created, I should see a new model, and it will also include supports. So what can you do with this? You can set it up for-- to get it printed or you can go back and [INAUDIBLE] like this, and see how it behaves, this new compensated model.

So while this is running, let's see-- let's go and review what we've covered so far. Sorry here. Yeah, so here it is. So again, we've gone and looked at AM sim, AM simulation, and we looked at how we can do the post-simulation feedback back into our workspace.

And let's go back and see the results here. So this is the new part. And you can create another workspace, and we're going to add the same SLM workspace, and then drag that part into the new workspace. So right now, I'm just going to go and do a manual edit here.

So it's telling me that there's-- let's see. So here's the part-- OK, so it's telling me that it needs some-- let's see. I'll get it. So it's telling me right now that it needs to be repaired for some reason. But this part can be brought in to another workspace, and then you can either start a new simulation or set it up for the build process.

So just to conclude here, we've shown you just a part of Netfabb's AM workflow. We've shown you how you can use the workflow for the direct metal laser sintering process. But that's not the only process that we can help you with. You can use it to set up the builds for other processes.

And we do have a list of OEMs that we support in our workspace, so it helps you set up your parts for that machine. And the fact that we also give you one tool to go from a part all the way to a print shows you that we have a full-- from end-to-end workflow.

So I think this concludes our discussion on the Netfabb end-to-end workflow. Now, if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them.

PRESENTER: John, you have a question?

AUDIENCE: I thought it was awesome. [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Wait, if I have to speak into this, so do you.

AUDIENCE: OK.

PRESENTER: Just kidding.

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Yeah, so the question is-- can you give him the microphone?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] is running 316, and there's not a parameter set for yet.

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Right, that's a good question. Let's see. 316 is actually currently not in our database right now. There is a stainless steel that has been added. It's going to be added in the next release. And if you are using local simulation, I can send you that. I think it's 17-4, at the moment.

316 is currently being worked on right now. In the future, we will actually give customers of instructions how you can go and validate your own materials, and use [INAUDIBLE] data to compare the results and tune your results to that process. But at the moment, we don't have it, but the team is working on it, at the moment-- for that material.

But we do have 17-4. Any other questions?

PRESENTER: As we in sales like to say, stay tuned. No other questions? All right, let's give Edgar and Kevin a good round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]