Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has introduced the HxGN Additive Manufacturing Suite of software to facilitate operational excellence in service bureaus using 3D printing.
HxGN Additive Manufacturing Suite ties together four of Hexagon’s software tools, with users able to access features for design through to post-processing in one place.
The company has recognised that users of additive manufacturing are hindered by a complex array of tools that are not cross-compatible, while also noting that many software products on the market better address prototyping applications than they do manufacturing ones. Hexagon has therefore introduced the Additive Manufacturing suite, which is comprised of its DESIGNER CAD solution, AM STUDIO build preparation software, Simufact Additive process simulation tool, and ESPRIT EDGE CAM software.
“The point [of Additive Manufacturing Suite] is bundling the solutions together to come up with a solution that addresses a specific market segment,” Hexagon Director Global Strategy and Business Development Mathieu Perennou told TCT. “The AM Suite is addressing the need of the process development people, basically the part suppliers, the company that actually making parts, and to be even more specific, this is focusing on metal powder bed fusion.”
Hexagon is targeting users of metal powder bed fusion with the Additive Manufacturing Suite for two reasons. The first is that AM STUDIO is designed to support the metal powder bed fusion process, and the second is that Hexagon sees that as the most mature metal 3D printing technology set. The company anticipates expanding the reach of Additive Manufacturing Suite to more 3D printing processes, by bundling more products and adapting existing elements, but as it comes to market with the product metal powder bed fusion is the focus. From Hexagon’s perspective, one of the key issues for the users of these technologies is a fragmented workflow.
“What the user can struggle with is different products not talking to each other,” Perennou said. “You spend your time doing imports and exports with the risk of human error or not using the right data. The idea [of AM Suite] is that you have ease of use, one single environment and interface, so it’s really easy and the products are fully connected so you can have a streamlined and seamless workflow.”
Typically, the additive manufacturing workflow for a service bureau starts with the nominal geometry of a product already supplied. But Perennou is keen to point out that, at best, this is a semi-finished product. Hexagon is pushing forward the Additive Manufacturing Suite as the solutions portfolio to help complete it.
With DESIGNER, users will be able to prepare the part that the service bureau wants to manufacture by, for example, adding machine allowance into the part design ready for machining further down the line. This geometry will then be fed into AM STUDIO, where the user will be able to alter part orientation, support generation, nesting and slicing. Simufact Additive will then take the output of AM STUDIO and run a simulation that helps to mitigate manufacturing issues like cracks, distortions and recoater interference.
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“You’re going to have distortions,” said Perennou, “and you will need to take that into consideration because otherwise you [could] print this outside of tolerance. So, Simufact can do the compensation step where it compares the virtual print to the nominal geometry or the print and say, ‘I was supposed to print that part, I’m printing this, so that next time, after a few iterations, I come up with a part that is right.”
Once the simulation is done, the operator of Additive Manufacturing Suite can then come back to AM STUDIO to carry out slicing. But this is not the start of the potential back and forth between AM STUDIO and Simufact Additive. Because of a prior collaboration with CADS Additive – the original owner of the AM STUDIO software – an integration with Simufact Additive was already in place. This ‘lite version’ of Simufact within AM STUDIO allows the user of the Additive Manufacturing Suite to carry out quick assessments of the manufacturability of the parts moving through the process.
“So, if you have different ideas or different concepts – maybe I could orientate it like this or like that – ‘okay, let’s run it quickly in our simplified simulation module to see which one gives the best results,’” Perennou explained. “It will not go all the way to what Simufact can do, but it will give you some trends.”
Having moved through the AM STUDIO and Simufact Additive stages, ESPRIT EDGE will then help the user to programme the post-machining of the part. “That is also a differentiator,” Perennou said, “because at the end, we want to achieve not just, ‘can I print the part?’ It’s ‘can I actually make the part completely?’”
With Additive Manufacturing Suite, Hexagon is confident that users will be able to speed up manufacturing processes and lower costs, while also allowing manufacturers to collaborate, automate workflows and share best practices using Nexus, Hexagon’s ‘open digital reality platform.’
Nexus works by allowing users to connect data from multiple sources into a digital thread that enables real-time collaboration and instantaneous feedback loops as part of an open platform. Users can connect software and hardware to this digital thread, while having a visual of the entire dashboard on a web browser.
Read more: Hexagon unveils plans to grow 3D printing industry’s 'most flexible and open' ecosystem
Though similar to the recently introduced Additive Manufacturing Suite, Nexus differs on its openness and also in that its intended to connect the different silos, people and departments in the workflow. The data resides in the one location, Nexus, and can be shared across applications – so, when information has been generated in AM STUDIO, for example, it can be accessed by another product via Nexus. And that product doesn’t have to be a Hexagon one.
“If a customer wants to use a product that is not a Hexagon product, shame on them,” Peennou joked, “but we accept it because we want to help streamline that workflow. Nexus can do that.”
While Hexagon is proud of its Nexus platform and extols the virtues of it for enabling cross-department collaboration, it also accepts that in some organisations, a central location with a stream of connected software tools is exactly what’s required.
“We believe there is more comfort in using only one product that does exactly what you want,” Perennou said. “If you want to say, ‘now I’d like to get some feedback from metrology,’ this is going to happen in the near future. We are going to connect the Additive Manufacturing Suite to Nexus, and then it could be connected to metrology and you could get some metrology data back in if you need it. That’s why we do this tight integration of our own products.”
Hexagon launched the Additive Manufacturing Suite at last week’s Formnext event, with Chuck Mathews, General Manager of Production Software at the company, suggesting the platform would help manufacturers ‘build on time, on budget and at increased scale with AM.’ In the eyes of Hexagon, additive manufacturing is at the edge of industrial adoption, and the company sees itself well-placed to help push it forward.
With the Additive Manufacturing Suite supplementing its Nexus offering, the company feels it has made a significant step in that direction, so customers can now go all in on Hexagon’s ecosystem of software solutions, or if it would rather, integrate its existing software with a selection of the Hexagon offering.
“It makes the offering a little bit complex, I would agree, but it also gives a lot of flexibility, really addressing the needs of the customer,” commented Perennou. “The idea at the end of the day is to answer the customers’ needs because [you can’t say] ‘we do all of that, but you can only do things with our software’ – in the world of additive manufacturing, with a lot of changes, it just doesn’t work like that. People use different solutions. They complain about it, but it’s a reality. We know it’s a pain, but we can help ease the pain.”
Earlier this week, Divergent announced it had closed a Series D funding round totalling 230 million USD, with Hexagon AB leading the investment with a 100 million USD contribution.
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