Hands-on Intro to End-to-End Additive Manufacturing Workflow using Netfabb for DMLS

JIM: Can you not hear me? Is that better? Whew. The final step after we've prepped our build is to actually go ahead and build. And this is where we're going to simulate what that build looks like prior to building it with our simulation tools. And we're going to slice it as well. And then send that off to the printer to print.

And that third step is really your build process. So I like to look at the total workflow from a very simplistic standpoint-- model prep, build prep, build. Simply put. Next slide. So we have three tiers within the Netfabb structure. The first tier is Netfabb standard. And this is all your classic STL file fixing tools, fixing up those triangles, bringing the nodes together and so forth, as well as your native CAD-- all typical CAD software you can bring in natively to Netfabb.

And I think Kevin will show that to you when he kicks this off. Some other keys to the standard tier is slicing. Typically, slicing is done at the machine level. But we can do slicing inside of Netfabb. Singular software approach. All the standard capabilities, moving from left to right, are in the next tier-- premium.

So in the premium, you get everything inside of standard in addition to support structures. So that's where we start to begin building and creating supports is at the premium level. Your latticing both uniform and non-uniform, starts at the premium level, as well as your 3D packing. Our flagship is Netfabb Ultimate. It's everything on the left and a couple of keys in there is scripting tools to automate some repetitive tasks.

Go to the folder, bring in these parts, orient them, put support structure, and then go to print, slice and print. Repetitive tasks. And that's the Lewis scripting. Lattice optimization is at the ultimate level, and really this is the load-bearing latticing, where I create some constraints, add some loads, and the last will go in there inside the part, get created based upon these loads and restraining conditions. So I like to call it load-bearing latticing.

And simulation-- Simulation LT, at the ultimate level, Edgar is going to show that to you.

So at this point, I'm done talking. I'm going to give it to Kevin and then Edgar. You're going to come--

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes. All right. Thanks, Jim. Thanks for the introduction. Again, I'm Kevin Mortzfield, Netfabb technical specialist for Netfabb software and Autodesk. And what we want to do today, our learning objective for today is we want to prepare a CAD model for additive manufacturing process.

We want to be able to orientate that part, and we're going to look at reducing the support structure when we do the orientation. The benefits, we're going to be able to do some edits on those supports. So we're going to be able to do some advanced editing, change the supports, make it good for our geometry.

And we're also going to identify-- Edgar is going to come up later and talk about how we can identify some common build failures and direct metal laser centering process and also show you how you can use some feedback from simulation to actually mitigate some build failures. So that's going to be a little bit later here. But let me just go over exactly what we're going to do in this hands on workflow of Netfabb today.

What Jim showed was a typical workflow, but we're going to actually do a workflow for the hands on using the SLM machine. So we're going to bring in a workspace here in a few minutes. It's going to be an SLM machine. We're going to bring in our CAD-- we're going to import our CAD file. And we're able to tessellate that file on the fly, so we're able to bring that file in and tessellate it the way that we want to.

And then after that CAD import, we're going to actually go and use our part orientation module where we can look at different orientations, previews of the supports with some parameters that we give it, so we can figure out if we want to build it in that orientation. And then we're going to move on and we're going to actually go to the support module and we're going to use a support script where we're actually going to automate the supporting.

And then after we put the supports on there, we're going to do some advanced steps with the supports to actually move supports and edit the supports. And then after that, we're going to actually slice the file for the SLM machine. And then when we move on from the slice, Edgar will come up and talk about the additive manufacturing build simulation, and we're going to talk about how you can minimize build crashes with some feedback that he's going to get from the simulation.

So go ahead. You should have this paper in front of you, I hope. I'm going to bring up Netfabb here. And we're going to go to page 7 of your handout. And we're actually going to open up Netfabb on your computer. You should be able to type in Netfabb on the bottom of your computer there, laptop.

There should be a data set on-- there's a folder in your-- if you look at your desktop, there should be a folder called data set. If you open up that folder, you should see the data sets for this class. It should start off with Netfabb, the classroom name, and also should be Netfabb hands on for additive manufacturing. Just let me know.

All right. So has everybody got the My Machines and Netfabb on their computer? I just want to make sure we've got them loaded. How's it look Edgar?

I'll turn mine back on. But how are we looking? Does everybody have Netfabb open? So at this point, you need to go on here and you should see this box like I have on the screen. Let Edgar know if you don't. Type in SLM, or actually hit Add Machine. I'm sorry, excuse me. Here. You want to hit Add Machine and put in SLM, and then I hit the spacebar.

And what it's going to do, it's going to bring up all these different 3D printers. We're going to bring up the SLM and we're going to actually load this workspace. We're going to use the 125 HL. We're going to select that. We're going to hit Add To My Machines. And what it does is it'll add to your My Machines folder on the left side here.

So that way, the next time you open up your Netfabb, you can just click on your machine or load multiple machines here. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Open. So once you loaded the SLM machine, hit backspace, picked your SLM 125, you're going to hit Open. Now give it a second. Those are virtual machines, so they're a little slow, probably my computer is going to pop it up a little quicker.

And now we have a workspace of the 125 SLM machine. And at this point, does everybody have their machine workspace up? I don't want to go too quick. We're going to go to System. And right now, we're going to make it where we tessellize the parts when they come in. So I want to make sure everybody has the same file setting I have for tessellation.

So go up to system tab. Go to the tessellation settings library. And you're going to go hit Medium Accuracy. And basically what this does, it gives you the control of how your 3D meshing your file when you bring it in. And we're going to make this the default Medium Accuracy. Hit Save. Has everybody done that? We're good to go?

All right, so now Right Click with your mouse, and you're going to hit Add Part. And you should have a directory that Edgar had mentioned earlier that you should see this file-- ag_finalbracket I just file? You might need to go to desktop. So once you get this window, yeah-- If you don't see it, let us know. All right.

So I'm gonna move ahead. I'm going to go and load the bracket, hit Open. ag_finalbracket

That point. It could be a bit of time to load that I just filed. We are working with virtual machines here. Yeah, turn that mic up. How's that looking, Edgar. Are we-- got the power loaded, everybody?

AUDIENCE: Yes, at least on this side.

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Go on right click. You want me to use that? I'm kind of comfortable using this, but I'll try that. All right. Can you hear me?

[APPLAUSE]

Don't know if this mics out-- there we go. All right. So at this point, we want to-- this part came in big, so we want to actually right click and we want to scale this. So right click, you should see this pop up. We want to scale this part and we want to put 0.5 in this scale factor. Make sure you have a fixed scaling ratio checked just in case. Put 0.5 and we're going to scale it to half size.

So following along on your worksheet here, we are now on page 9. Page 9. We're going to get through this. At this point, we want to orientate the part. So we got it on the platen, we scouted down, we want to orientate this part. So we're going to click on-- on the right here, you're going to see this orientate part box. Click on that.

And what you'll see here when you click on Search Orientation, you'll have some parameters here. You want to look on your sheet, page 9, and we want to put 40 degrees for the critical angle. So basically the critical angle is how much the supports are going to be on the angle of the part. Everything below 40 degrees will have a support. And we want to make sure that we select the precise volume arbitrary, and we also want to make sure we had the smallest rotation between orientations at 20 degrees. So I'll give you guys a few seconds for that.

AUDIENCE: It's 40 degrees from the horizontal platform, correct?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes, 40 degrees.

AUDIENCE: Is that a pretty standard definition across most of these tools?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: At least for Netfabb, it is. He asked the question, is it standard for the horizontal on the 40 degrees. [INAUDIBLE] everything. 40 degrees and below [INAUDIBLE] that's what's most important when you do the 40 [INAUDIBLE]. Just a preview on the [INAUDIBLE] so that when you hit preview or our different force here, [INAUDIBLE].

Why don't we go ahead-- everybody here will go ahead and search orientation. And what's going to happen here is it's going to go ahead and it's going to look at some of my [INAUDIBLE].

Check the mic now. It works OK. Good. So we want to go through the search orientation. And we have a ways to look at different ways of the part being supported. For example, you may want to click on the height and you can go up here and you can see the smallest height by clicking on this. It'll drop the part the lowest in the Z. If I go all the way down on this list, it will put the part to the highest Z.

For this exercise, I want to do the lowest support volume, so I'm going to go to support volume. And make sure yours is-- on mine, it's one. It may show a different on yours. Make sure you pick this orientation. One. You should see something like that. And then we're going to hit OK. So make sure you go to support volume, hit the lowest support volume here, 1.727, hit OK. And what it does is it orientates that part back in your workspace, so your 125 workspace, it's a quick way to orientate the part.

So we want to go ahead and we're now on page 11, if you're following along on the worksheet.

JIM: Kevin?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes.

JIM: There's a question.

AUDIENCE: Sorry, another question. Is the orient part feature predominantly just for SLM style machines, or is it also for other machines as well?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes. It can be worked on for SLA. All the different technologies you can use the orientation optimizer for it. Yeah, all the different 3D printing machines. That's what's ideal with Netfabb being able to be able to do that and put multiple different 3D printers on there. Yeah. So at this point, we're on page 11. We're going to go ahead and create the supports.

So on the right hand side, you should se Create Support box here. I want to make sure I'm not skipping any steps. And then we're going to load a script, OK? We have a script in your directory where we can automate creating supports, and we call them support scripts. So you guys see this support scripts tab. We're going to select that. Select that tab.

And then you're going to hit this little gear icon and we're going to load a support script that we want to use for this exercise. So we want to go to Import Script, and it should go to the directory where you have this SLM 125 underscore support.script. Hit Open. I'll give you time to walk around, make sure everybody's got that.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

We're OK now? So we got the support script on there. You want to make sure-- and you go to the support script tab, and you want to use this down arrow. Make sure you pick the one we added. And then you're going to hit Execute down here. You guys see this Execute box? You going to hit Execute. And this support script will automatically put all these supports in here.

I want to make sure I didn't miss anything. So at this point, we want to go and edit these supports. So there's a few different exercises starting on page 12 and 13. If you kind of want to watch what I'm doing here, you can see the steps that I'm taking. You can try these. I would definitely recommend you try the one, the first couple I do. If you're not able to finish, that's fine.

We'll still be able to create these supports and finish up here this workflow. But I'm going to actually take this support and move it off this part. Do you see how this support is hitting this surface? It will mar the surface when we try to cut that off and it's going to cause problems. Well, we have an easy way to select the support with your left mouse button, make it light blue.

And then you're going to go to this Edit tab. And then you're going to go all the way down-- so hit the Edit tab, select that support, hit the Edit tab, go all the way to the angled block support on the bottom. Make this yes. And what this does is it brings up these part placement arrows. And I move it sideways. I'm going to pick this orange one, and if you hold down your left mouse button with the arrow, you can move that support to the [? platan, ?] And I'll give you time with that.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

We're good with that? I want to show you this next one here. We have this support. It's coming down. It's really skinny here. I can select this support and then move the support into the part so gets rid of this thin support hanging over here. So if I select this and we go all the way to our last-- we go back to the Edit box again. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to make it yes.

And it's going to bring up them part placement arrows again. And I'm going to-- with my left mouse button-- pick the orange one. We're just going to move it into the part. That way, we got rid of that long support going to the [? platan ?] that could be a building problem. I'm going to go ahead and move along-- page 13-- with a couple more edits. We'll give you some time. Here's a difficult one here. We have, in the inside here-- let me find it here--

We have this support here that's going to the bottom of the [? platan. ?] So when I select it, it turns light blue. Well, we can grab this and push it into the part to have all the supports up here rather than this support coming down to the bottom again. So it's the same as before. We're going to go to the Edit tab. We're going to go to angled block support. We're going to make this yes.

And we're going to grab this orange part placement arrow, slide it in, and then we got the support not going to the [? platan ?] It's in that area where we want it to be.

JIM: So Kevin?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes.

JIM: We're kind of lagging behind. So we're going to catch up.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: No, but there are ways to do some editing where you can grab nodes and create supports that go into other supports, yes. I don't show that on this exercise today, but yes, you're able to do that. I'll show you how you can move nodes here. I'm going to show you how to move a node, a support, and stretch it out here a second.

JIM: So Kevin, I think we're up to speed. You can do cluster painting.

AUDIENCE: We're good back here.

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yeah, I'm gonna show you a way where you can grab a node. Is there a question?

AUDIENCE: No. We're good.

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: All right. So I want to grab this here and show you another one. We have this one here. It's not long enough. We need to add-- make this a little thicker support here so we can easily go to our bottom view or top view here. Bottom. And what I'm going to do is we have these viewing nodes, these little blue dots you see.

So I just went to a bottom view to this support here. I selected it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this node here, and when you select it, it turns light blue. Be careful not to select a whole bunch. And then you're just gonna slide this over. And what it does is it stretches out that support. And then I can grab this support or this node here on the beginning here and I can drag it out and--

Let it just take its time there. We can drag it out, let it do its operation here. I made it a little thicker. So were you guys able to grab that node and do that?

JIM: I think it's not so important to do this, it's just to kind of show you that you can move the anchors that represent the supports on the part-- if you need to-- after you've created the supports.

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: So it's a quick way, yeah, just to throw a little more support in an area. And then we have one more thing I really want to show you on changing the supports and working with an advanced support operation. This area here, I want to put some support here on this angle here. And we can go and do that. We can actually run another support script on an area cluster that we mark.

So if you see this icon up here, the little green box with the arrow marked cluster manual, I can select that and it's going to make this green dot here. And you can use your control and middle mouse button to make it smaller or bigger. And we're just going to go to this area here on the part and just mark an area.

AUDIENCE: What mouse button are you holding down?

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Left mouse button to hold and mark. Control middle mouse button to-- if you're marking tool is too big. So just mark an area. Doesn't really matter how much you mark. I mean, you don't have to mark the whole wall here, but mark about what I have on the screen.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: This arrow here.

JIM: And you see how big that is? You might want to reduce the size.

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: You've got to go up top here, mark cluster manual. Flick that. And then you have a green dot and you're going to mark on the bottom or the part here on that angle. You should see red. Are we good to go?

I don't want that. So to get out of-- then you have to right click on here. I've already done it. But when you right click, you should see Create-- I want to make sure I'm on the right page here. So we're on the bottom of page 13 where we mark the cluster. Now I'm going to go here. I may have to remark mine.

Because I, yeah-- then we go here. We're going to say-- you're going to right click on where you marked and then you're going to go Create Script Action Support on Cluster. So right click. Create Script Action Support on Cluster. Select that. And what this is going to do is we're going to be able to pick an action from a script to create automatic support in that area. Is everybody here?

Just go on ahead and select SLM 125 where it says Area with Volume Support. Execute that. And it creates your script here on that particular area of the part. So at this point, I'll give you a minute here.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yes. So the question was, can you make different scripts or different kind of supports for when I did the manual cluster? Yes, we picked an action from that script, which was a volume support that you see here, but yes, you could have different-- you could have a whole list of scripts. You could make those. That's why that script we have here was made for this particular part, but you could make one with different support actions. Yes, you'd be able to do that.

AUDIENCE: Follow-up question-- can you swap the [INAUDIBLE].

KEVIN MORTZFIELD: Yeah, you could mark it and delete it, yes. So at this point, you want to hit Apply Support on the bottom-- and if you didn't get through all the editing, that's fine. You can just hit Apply Support just to move on for time. We're at this point where we have the part back on the platen. I do want to make sure that we go in here and make-- we're going to change this. We're going to put the build properties for this SLM machine here for this workspace. We're going to hit Change here, and we're going to bring in 50 micron aluminum material.

So do you guys see this where you hit change? And you're going to go move all the way down with your slider here. You should see this aluminum material where it says ATU 50. Select that and hit Select Configuration. And we also want to move down here and say, what build strategy is. It's going to be a solid part.

Let me know, is everybody to that point? I will move it. Yes. I went up here to change. Make sure you had Apply Supports when you were in the support to get to this back to this screen. You're going to hit the Change tab and you're going to use the slider on the side here. Using your left mouse button, move it down and pick the aluminum material, ATU 50 micron here.

Make selected blue, and hit Select configuration. So select it, Select Configuration. Close out of here. And then we want to make sure the part here has the right properties that we want. So we want to make this solid part. There's a dropdown here. Select Solid Part. So is everybody at that point? We're good?

All right. So at this point, I actually want to take this part-- you know, Jim had mentioned on the Netfabb workflow we have model prep, build prep, and build. We've done those three. We're to the third stage now where we're actually going to slice the parts. So we're going to go here and to the project tree on the left, and you're going to select your part here. And you're going to slide that part holding your left mouse button down to the Slice folder.

Put in 0.05 for your slice layer. I'll give you a minute there. So select it, slide it down to the Slice folder, 0.05 for your slice layer. This is where you put in your thickness for your 2D cross sections of your slice file. I'm going to hit Start, and it's going to go ahead and it's going to slice that file.

So if you put in 0.05 and hit slice, and then you had this slider here. I'm now in the slice context menu here where you can slide through that part and look at your 2D cross sections-- looking from the bottom going up with the slider, guys. I'll give you a minute. How's it looking? They caught up?

So we've sliced it. I'm just showing you here, we have a slider. You can quickly slide through the part. You can also hit animate, hit play. And it'll basically show you how the laser would go about tracing those 2D layers. So I'm going to go ahead and stop here, bring back this part here, and at this point-- so we're to the build stage where we actually will send this sliced formatted file to the machine here.

We'll select both these files here and then we'll hit our right mouse button, and we can export out. We can export out-- this is an SLM machine-- so we're going to export out of .slm file. Why is this important? Well, it's important because you don't have to open up the SLM software. You don't have to prep it. We've already done it. We've already picked the aluminum powder that the scan strategy and we've got the supports created.

So you're able to export out this SLM, and we also have other formats for other machines such as a [? Conity, ?] your [? Renshaw ?] machines, SLAs. SLI and CLIs are very common slice formats that we export out. But for this one, we're going to do SLM. And then you just export it out. It'll all be on one file, all your support files and part files. And then you just set it to your machine. You have a shared drive. Go to your SLM machine and start your build.

So what's significant is you're able to do this with different technologies-- your Renishaw machines, your solid concept laser machines, [? EELs ?] machines. So at this point, I want to bring back the part and bring up the PowerPoint and bring up Edgar here in a second. But I just want to go over what we just went through real quick.

Basically following along with this worksheet, we brought in a workspace. We brought the part into the workspace. We set the tessellation of the part-- what kind of part we're bringing in, the geometry, what tessellation control we had for that. We orientated the part in our part orientation module to see different orientation previews to pick what we thought was most best for that part.

We picked the lowest build volume support, and then we actually edited those supports to make it ideal to be able to post process that part easily. And now we want to move on to the Autodesk solution for simulation, and then we're also going to talk about how we can use those results to make sure we minimize build mistakes.

So you guys are all in Las Vegas, right? We got good odds that this build that we just put together hopefully can build, right? We've got-- that machine is probably going to cost you-- a metal machine, direct metal laser center, it's going to cost you from $500,000 to a $1 million, right? So we want good odds that that's going to build and complete. So that's where Edgar is going to talk about simulation to help you out there. So thank you.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Can anyone hear me? OK, great. So at this stage, you should have a parted supported on a build plate. Is everyone there? Sound sue me. You guys are in there. So the next step would be we're going to use our simulation software to actually look at common bill failures and direct metal laser centering process.

We'll look at distortion build failures, recorder blade interference, hotspots and lack of fusion, and what we provide is a simulation engine that will feedback graphical information about distortion build failures, recorder blade interference, and hotspots and lack of fusion. And I'm not going to get in detail of the technology or our solver. I'm going to just take you through the whole pre simulation setup process. And while it's running, I'll go back and talk about our simulation engine.

So at this step, you have your part with supports. I want you to go down to the bottom right and there is a button called Start Build Simulation. If you click on that, what you will get would be you enter the name of-- just enter any name. Try AGD final part. And what this does is it's creating a 3M mail file. And this 3M mail file has information about this machine, as well as the build plate, and it has the model as well as the supports.

Now in the next step, you'll get the built simulation box. And I want you to select simulation utility, LT. That's the only option that you have at the moment. So I want you to go ahead and hit Simulate. And it's going to take all that information from the build volume to the parts, the supports, and bring it into a graphical interface.

And we're going to use this graphical interface to get you to setup this part for the powder that you're going to use and the operating conditions for this machine. So you can hit the right mouse button, just to kind of rotate. And you can zoom in with your scroll wheel. So what you're seeing, you're seeing the part. You're seeing the supports.

And you should be in the Home tab. The Home tab will give you all these icons and we're going to go through each of these icons and describe what they're doing. And all the settings should be starting in page 18. So starting at page 18, you should see the local simulation with the part in the build plate.

And then we're going to go through the Home tab here and go through each button. So the materials property, the material button, if you click on it, contains the materials that you have available-- cobalt chrome, inconel, titanium. These are the properties for the materials that are available for use. And you can make your own material properties.

You'll notice that at the very bottom of this window, you have all the property materials, parameters that you can enter here. So I'm gonna go ahead and close this off. The next box is the process parameters. So you should get a box with all the process parameters. When you use the ultimate, it comes with all these process parameters that you can use.

And a process parameter is a small simulation scale of the properties that you're using, as well as the process parameters for that machine. I'll talk about this a little later. I just want to show you this interface. And you'll notice that if you click on one of these parts and open them, you'll notice that there are typical process parameters for this machine.

If your machine is using a different process parameter, you can go ahead and enter it here and generate your own PR files. Cancel out of this and close this window. And the next tab is the machine parameters. It recognized that you used an SLM, you're using one laser, and here is where you can select the process parameter that you want apply to this part.

So I'd like you to select the aluminum, the first one on the list here. And I'm going to apply this process parameter to the part as well to the supports. You have the option of applying it to different parts of the build platform, or you can do a process parameter for the part, as well as for the supports. But we're going to apply it uniformly to the parts and to the supports.

So once you've changed this, go ahead and accept it. Say, OK. The next is the build plate. And these are the boundary conditions for the build plate of the machine. The material, I'm going to use the same aluminum powder, as well as I use the same material for the build plate. So I'm going to have this clicked on. I'm going to say that I do want the material for the powder and the build plate to be the same.

If you unclick this, you can change the build plate material if you want. But make sure that this is clicked on. Heating temperature of the build plate. Do you want to keep the build plate at a certain temperature? So in the heating, select a control temperature, and just put down 30c. So the build plate, it's saying that during the simulation, the build plate will be held at 30 degree C throughout the build process.

Mechanical constraints-- this is where you tell the software whether you want the simulation to take to account the distortion of the build plate, if you're removing it from the machine. If you have very large parts and you know that build plate is probably going to deform, so you'd have to select the-- simulate the build bolt release, if you have a large part.

But for this part, it's a small part relative to the build plate, so I would set this to fixed bottom-- fix the bottom to the build plate, meaning that it's not going to take into account the distortion of the build plate. Press OK. So is everyone up to build plate parameters? Yes. Yes.

AUDIENCE: I would imagine that I have one of these machines and I'm running parts all day long, I'm using the same machine configuration, same build plate configuration for most everything-- can I save a group of these settings and just use that with a different path all every time?

EDGAR AGUIRRE: That's a good question. I know that you can save off parameters-- project files with certain parameters. Yeah, that is a good question. I could answer that offline. But I mean, that's something that you would you would really want to be able to do, just making sure that-- I know that if you're using a PRM, it's going to use the process parameters that you're using, that PRM file, as long as you haven't changed anything, it's always you can use that over and over again. But we'll take that offline. And any other questions?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

EDGAR AGUIRRE: I'm sorry. Can you give him a microphone?

AUDIENCE: Yeah. I just have a concern on the material properties. Like as we see that these are all metal posters, so and these are [? autotropic ?] in nature. And what I could see from the materials is that we consider the only [INAUDIBLE] [? model of ?] [? stuff. ?] Like, do we actually consider the nonlinear module properties into account?

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Yeah, this is a non-linear solver. So I would say, yes, we're actually looking into those properties. I mean, we're not looking at the-- it's kind of thermal mechanical solver. And does that kind of answer your questions? We could take this offline and I can answer this?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

EDGAR AGUIRRE: So we've gone through the build plate. The next thing is the operating conditions. We're not going to change anything, but I just wanted to let you know, this is where you're taking into account the ambient temperature, as well as the powder-- how you want the powder to behave during the simulation.

If you select uniform heat loss, you're assuming that the powder is absorbing the heat away uniformly away from the part. If you have trap powder or if you have parts that are very close together, you can't assume that. So in that case, you would have to choose conduct to loose powder-- that means, it's going to simulate the powder as well as the supports and the part.

In this case, we're just going to keep it at uniform. The next button is heat treatment. You can apply a heat treatment to the part and to relieve stress after the simulation. So it will actually simulate this heat treatment-- and before you remove the part from the build plate. So it's assuming that it's going to heat treat with part and the supports on the build plate.

We're not going to change this. Next thing is a solver. The solver settings-- this is a thermal mechanical solver. So there's an option to do either one or the other, but by default, it does both. Recorder blade multiplier, it's always set to 1. This parameter is if you're building four parts that are the same, but you just want to simulate one.

And the multiplier assumes it's giving the extra timestamp to build the three other similar parts before it comes back to the next layer of the part you want to simulate. So it's kind of a timestamp to kind of save you time in simulating that one part. So we're going to set that to 1. Recorder blade tolerance is, how much tolerance, you can tolerate from the part distorting up in the z direction before it-- into the next layer.

So right now, it's set to 80. That means if it goes 20% into the next layer, more than 100%, it's going to give you a recorder blade interference error. You could tell it to stop the simulation, if you want. I'm going to keep that unchecked. And I'm going to actually include support failure. So I'm going to set this to 900 megapascals.

So this is how much it would take to rip the supports away from the part. And this can depend on the material that you're using and the results that you have. In the Results tab, I would keep plasticity on. This gives you the results of the actual distortion as your part is being removed from the build plate.

So mesh settings-- right now, we're going to set the maximum [? adaptivity ?] level to 3. And what we're doing here is that we're selecting how many layers you want to simulate at a time. So right now, it's set to 20. This is really coarse, but for this example-- so we can get through the simulation quickly-- I'll set it to the default settings.

Definitely, you would have to make changes to this, depending-- there is another option for wall thickness. You can enter the amount of the minimum wall thickness for your features and it guarantees that you will have at least two elements when it actually re-measures the part. So I hit the activity to 3-- I think the instructions might tell you to go to 20 layers, but we'll set it to 20 for this example.

Now the next step is a mesh preview. You can go ahead and tell it to do a mesh preview. So it shows you how it's going to re-mesh the part. Here, I'm just going to enter-- you have to save this project. So give it a name. agfinalpart-- and this is just the project file name for this simulation. And so here it interrogates your machine before it does the re-meshing.

And right now as it's re-meshing, you can go to the Job Manager. Oh, hey, it's already done. So this is your re-meshed file. So has everyone reached this step? Yes? You have? So I'm just going to go to the View tab. If you go up to the View tab on the top and hit the clipping plane-- so just kind of move this window away and kind of rotate.

You'll notice that there's a line. This is the line. This is the normal of how you kind of-- of where you're looking at this part. And there is a-- under the transform section here in the box-- there is something called the distance along that normal, which is that z. If you move it back and forth, you can interrogate the mesh. If you look closely at the mesh, you'll notice that some of these features only have one element per feature size.

And that's probably not enough to get you good results. You need to have at least two. So you need to go back into the mesh settings and kind of reduce the-- make some changes until you can actually see two elements per smallest feature size. In this example, we're just going to keep it the way it is right now. I'm going to close this window and I'm going to turn off the clipping.

So here on top, if you just hit clipping again, you should get back the part. Let's go back to the Home tab. So the next part would be simulating this part. So we're going to hit this simulation button. And in fact, you know, actually click on it and I'm going to cancel it. I'm going to go and-- so right now, there's two options.

Right now, the clubbing on the cloud was actually chosen, and I didn't want to do that. I actually want to go and hit the Solve button. Solve will solve it locally. But you have an option of actually solving it on the cloud. So here, make sure that you hit Solve button, not Solve on Cloud. Did anyone hit the Solve on Cloud?

If you did hit the Solve on Cloud, I'd like you to go to the Job Manager.

AUDIENCE: I canceled out.

EDGAR AGUIRRE: Oh, you canceled out? If you canceled out, that's fine. But make sure that you solve it locally. So as this is running, you'll have this job manager that allows you to preview actually your simulation. Right now, I'm running at 5%. Yours could be different. Now while this is running, I'm going to close this out. And I'm going to go and introduce you to our simulation software here.

So remember, we talked about the common view photos that we can detect with our engine. This is a thermo mechanical modeling software. This is the kind of basic workflow. Heat transfer with temperature history, based on the machine parameters and the machine properties. You get a mechanical response, and then you can see the output.

This is a very well-known workflow for thermo mechanical modeling and it's been known since the '80s. But with our technology, we've been able to create these custom elements that allow you to run much faster than most general purpose solvers. And even with that, even running faster, when the heat source gets down into the direct metal laser centering size, then this is still not enough.

So we've implemented what we call the small scale and the large scale. So remember I talked about the PRM file. Well, this is the actual PRM generation here on the left. We're taking process parameters and we're taking property materials and we're doing a small scale of that simulation. Once that's done, you generate a PRM file, and then you can use that over and over again and you are plotting to the larger scale.

So that's how we can get the speeds that we get with our solution. For example, this full build plate I think was done in four hours. Or so building something like this in real life would take about days, so for you to get back results-- I mean, it allows you to at least see issues that you might have on your actual build simulation.