Neri Oxman presents at SOLIDWORKS World 2018.
When you're spending three days at a software conference, the last thing you expect to be left contemplating is the natural world. Robotics, virtual reality and manufacturing, on the surface, couldn't appear further from mother nature but as attendees to SOLIDWORKS World 2018 have learned this week, those worlds are becoming more intertwined.
Kicking off the first general session as the Los Angeles Convention Centre, SOLIDWORKS CEO, Gian Paolo Bassi proclaimed we should be talking about an "industrial renaissance" rather than revolution, thinking about humans and not just machines. In addition to a slew of SOLIDWORKS product announcements including the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace, xDesign and Social Collaboration Services platform, the nature-inspired and people-focussed theme could be found in talks and technology launches throughout the week.
MIT Professor, Neri Oxman perhaps spoke about this idea best in her keynote which looked at how we're "moving from the age of the machine to the age of the organism". Oxman, who leads MIT's Mediated Matter research group, made a sound case for designers to learn from the fluid and self-sufficient way nature behaves, and rethink how we design our future. Nature doesn't need CAD or 3D printing to exist, it grows organically in response to its environment and Oxman believes a shift to Computational Aided Design rather than CAD as we know it, will enable designers to harness that same power.
In a conference highlight, Oxman also showed a glass printer which can produce intricate honey-like structures with thoughtful temperature control, citing that this type of technology could allow us to harvest solar energy on an industrial scale through optical lenses in the future.
Desktop Metal's Live Parts generative design tool.
3D printing was big news at SWW18 with several vendors such as Stratasys, 3D Systems and HP announcing partnerships with Dassault Systemes. Another was Boston-based metal 3D printing company, Desktop Metal which launched its Live Parts generative design tool in collaboration with SOLIDWORKS. It’s called Live Parts because parts are just that – live organisms in a cloud-based platform reacting to forces in real time. Designers can literally watch as their parts “grow” towards a desired end point – similar to how a plant grows towards the sun – and witness it shed weight to deliver an optimum part in a matter of minutes. A genuinely cool process to watch and though it may sound similar to other generative or topology tools already on the market, the way this works in real-time based on cell structures, is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
"We should implement the way nature grows things which involves very low level cells which are like little machines that create chemicals and respond to chemical stimulus and build a system that fabricates an object out of these low level cells," Andy Roberts, Senior Software Engineer at Desktop Metal told TCT. "Additive manufacturing goes through several stages, you print it and then you sinter it, so there are a lot of processes going on, a lot of chemicals, temperature changes and so what we find is parts that have lot of straight lines and sharp angles are candidates for potential problems.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
"What we find is that with nature, the constant combination of changing forces creates organic structures that are resilient to unexpected things. So for example our parts have naturally smooth transitions and they're evenly balanced and they uniformly hold up and they work better and sinter better as a result so we get more resilient and stronger parts."
Sitting down with Mike Rushton, Product Portfolio Manger focussed on additive manufacturing at SOLIDWORKS, I was curious to know how this idea feeds into the wider AM world. Mike made an interesting observation about why the mono-material nature of AM lends itself so well to similarities in nature.
Mark Rushworth, "The majority of additive processes only use a single material and nature tends to only use single materials, nature is not very good at multiple materials, it's all about. That's why it lends itself to additive because you can generate very complex structures in a single material and you tailor the structural properties of the design by using things like lattice structures, varying the thickness of material. Lattice structures can have different resistance or stiffness in different directions so you can really tailor it to whatever situation. It's the same with nature. Materials versus structures."
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