Altair has announced that Additive Works, a company specialising in simulation and process software for additive manufacturing. Additive Works has now joined the Altair Partner Alliance (APA) and its Amphyon software will now be available for HyperWorks users.
Amphyon is a simulation-based, process software for powder bed-based, laser beam melting additive manufacturing processes. It allows for automatic optimisation of part orientation as well as a build-up process simulation and the adaption of process parameters in order to achieve a higher part quality and more process stability.
‘Amphyon’s innovative approach to 3D printing simulation provides an efficient and practical solution to benefit a wide range of industrial users involved with designing and printing complex metallic parts,’ said Subir Roy, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Altair. ‘The GPU-based software with its intuitive GUI enables the user to do trade-off studies for part orientation as a function of accessibility, support volume, build time etc. Distortion calculations from simulation can be used to compensate the part geometry to minimise deviation from the design target.’
This addition adds further capabilities for additive manufacturing processes to the APA software package. Amphyon joins, 3-matic, which enables design modification and remeshing, allowing users to redesign CAD, scanned or topology-optimised data for 3D Printing.
Amphyon consists of several modules which support and enhance pre-processing steps. There are three major applications Amphyon and its modules focus on: helping designers learn how to deal with additive manufacturing, helping researchers study process physics by numerical simulation and helping production optimise pre-processing and build data in a few steps.
‘Amphyon was designed to replace the experiment driven development of build-up strategies in laser beam melting with simulations and geometry analyses,’ said Dr Nils Keller, co-founder and CEO at Additive Works. ‘Due to the numerically calculated knowledge about process-induced thermal and mechanical loads, the build-up process can already be optimised on the level of pre-processing. This will save HyperWorks users a lot of resources and additionally enhance the part quality as well as the level of automation.’
As a simulation-based process software for additive manufacturing, Amphyon can be used to calculate the optimal orientation of a part to additively manufacture it. Also, the build-up process can be simulated in order to calculate stresses and part deformation and generate a pre-deformed STL file.
An introductory webinar for Additive Works will be held on July 11 at 10 am ET.
