nTop
Brad Rothenberg has paused the conversation. He’s discussing the adoption of nTop’s computational design software, making a point about what might trigger its growth when he remembers there’s something he wants to share.
We sit in the Los Angeles Convention Center on day three of RAPID + TCT. We’re a cross-country flight from headquarters where there is a 16-year-old intern who has been tasked with getting to grips with the nTop software. Once comfortable, his second challenged was to select a part from a robot – the intern is a member of his high school’s robotics team – and make it lighter.
He is two days in and already he has set up a model where he can vary the parameters of a structure, set up a simulation to run the analysis of that structure, before using the field to drive the parameters to solve the optimisation problem he set himself.
“He picked up nTop in a day and a half,” Rothenberg says. “The new generation of engineers, they have such a computational first way of thinking. I really believe that’s the future of our industry and I’m excited by it.”
nTop came to market in the autumn of 2018 with latticing design software that has evolved to include real-time visualisation, field optimisation and implicit interoperability functions as updates and upgrades the nTop Platform. At RAPID + TCT, there were more additions to the capability as nTop rolled out nTop 5, describing it as a ‘leap forward’ in computational design.
Chief among the new features is an upgraded implicit modelling kernel, which has been born from customer feedback that suggested many nTop users were looking to manufacture parts with machining rather than additive manufacturing. Among nTop’s hundreds of customers, the software is facilitating the design of large-scale bulkheads for aircraft systems and structural components that are machined rather than 3D printed. This led nTop to focus resource on incorporating ‘more digits of precision’ into its implicit model to enable smoother surfaces and facilitate the design of parts that were up to machining tolerances.
It has also seen users of its software work to engineer complex components, such as heat exchangers that feature up to 10,000 channels. Because users of nTop are building computational models, and therefore not only capturing the requirements for a single-state design but rather all possible states, nTop felt it was becoming increasingly important to match precision with speed.
“It’s really important to see the changes to the model coming out because they trace all the way through,” Rothenberg explains. “We realised there were some upgrades we can make to make it faster and even more precise to enable the future. So, we re-architected the core modelling technology with increased precision, increased speed, and also to enable more interoperability.”
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nTop
What nTop now offers to market with nTop 5 is ‘this procedural and adaptive resolution’ where parts can be modelled at micron-scale, metre-scale or even hundreds of metres-scale within the same model, seeing the results of updates in real-time.
It has sought to supplement this capability by including mechanical simulation, computational fluid dynamics and build preparation functionality in its latest implicit modelling kernel through a series of partnerships. An integration with Materialise Magics gives users the ability to import parts using the *.implicit file format directly into Magics with no mesh required, while an Autodesk Fusion add-in allows users to integrate implicit models into larger product assemblies and prepare models for production.
nTop has also aligned with Hexagon scSTREAM to incorporate CFD simulations earlier in the design process, Intact.Simulation to take advantage of its mechanical simulation tools capable of removing meshing bottlenecks, and cloudfluid to enable CFD analysis on complex geometries.
Rothenberg says nTop has taken this approach to allow his team to focus on geometric representation – “What we’re really good at.” – while enabling interoperability with the best-in-class tools – “To provide a toolset for the industry to build on top of that.”
He adds: “In my opinion, engineering software is not really a winners take all kind of market. The best-in-class tools can all be leveraged. It’s all about partnering.”
nTop
It is an approach that seems to be working. Since announcing its Implicit Interop partnership with EOS last year, nTop customers have exported more *.implicit files in its Core application than they were exporting meshes. With its latest round of partnerships, Rothenberg believes nTop is offering a solution for the challenge of designing complex components. Taking an ‘arbitrarily complex heat exchanger’, for example, the nTop CEO suggests a fully implicit tool chain that allows users to run simulation on data that doesn’t require a traditional STL file format could begin to enable the manufacture of metre-scale components with hundreds of thousands of cooling channels.
Facilitating such applications would build on what is already being done with the nTop platform. Per Rothenberg, the company is ‘in a little over 400 accounts’, with the likes of Ocado Technology, COBRA Golf and Northrop Grumman among the organisations to have had success using nTop. It is this – the manufacture of computationally-designed golf club heads and grocery fulfilment robots – not new features, by which Rothenberg measures success.
Before RAPID + TCT 2024 got underway, nTop brought a couple of hundred of new, existing and prospective users of its technology to its first user summit in LA. Here, the aforementioned trio told of their experiences implementing nTop, with strategic collaborators and skilled engineers also providing their insights. To Rothenberg, it marked a ‘really important moment for nTop’. Never before had the company had so many people in one place talking about its computational design capabilities and the type of applications they are enabling.
nTop
“It still feels like the beginning of the journey for us,” Rothenberg says of industry adoption of the nTop Platform. “There’s a core niche set of users across mechanical design that are really pushing this and driving the future of this, but it’s very far from broad adoption across businesses. The tools are just getting [to a place] where we have the infrastructure, we have the manufacturing technology, we have the compute – we launched a strategic alliance with Nvidia because we don’t want compute to be a bottleneck – the stuff that we’re doing moving forward is how do we drive more broad adoption and more value to our customers with computational design?”
The way to do that, nTop feels, is to build bridges ‘from our island to all the other islands that exist.’ nTop has proved itself capable of that through its many collaborations, ensuring designs developed in its platform can be integrated into other software platforms and pulled back out, but there’s also a need to build one to a younger demographic.
As Rothenberg continues to scroll, more screenshots and messages flash up on the screen, all from a 16-year-old with just about two days’ experience with nTop. It reaffirms one of the next objectives for nTop.
“More and more, I’m a big believer in getting access to all the students, because when you’re in school, that’s where you learn new software,” Rothenberg finishes. “I still use the software that I learned in school, I still know the software I learned in school, that’s the place where you learn new processes. So, I think the adoption of computational design is a generational shift. As much as I’d like to just snap my finger and have everybody using computational design for everything on the planet, the adoption is going to happen over time as more students start to push these processes.”
