Virtual Engineering

Virtual Engineering Improves the Success Rate, Reducing Time and Costs

Simulation for additive manufacturing is a valuable step in the production of 3D printed parts.

No strings attached!

Engineers and 3D printing specialists work closely with designers to fully understand the perfect part orientation and support structure design, in order to reduce the number of iterations and tests during construction.

Through our part and process simulation service, we help our customers save time and costs: We identify and eliminate weaknesses ahead of production, thus reducing the risk of part failure. Our experts identify areas vulnerable to warping, delamination, and excessive deformation by leveraging a diverse set of detailed material models.

Through our virtual engineering service, we are able to increase your success rate by predicting the thermo-mechanical behaviour of the materials during printing.
The challenge of mechanical material modelling is to find and describe the correlation between stress and strain. While in linear material models the stress is directly proportional to the strain, under real-world operating parameters the correlation is different. Materials usually show nonlinear behaviour and respond differently according to temperature variations, strain rates, load vectors, and load types.

We help our customers harness their components’ highest potential by developing non-linear material models for our AM materials and numerically optimizing the build orientation.

Benefits at a Glance

We optimize your part’s weight and function
We enable radically new AM-based design approaches
We consider the complete product lifecycle
We select the ideal AM material specific to your component’s required performance profile

Solutions

Process Simulation
Material testing and modeling
Structural Design
Unique lattice-based functional Design Structural Simulation
Build job optimization
NVH Optimization

How Additive Manufacturing comes to Life

Project Reference

Material used: Ultracur3D® RG 35

Project description and challenge: A major chemicals group’s Adhesive Research specialists contacted the Forward AM team. The customer was currently using several adhesive tape strips to fix parts together. The problem is that this method required exhaustive preparation, did not deliver robust results, and the components sometimes fell apart. We developed a Snap-Fit design to do the same job faster, more reliably, and requiring fewer manual steps.

Our solution and added value for the customer: We applied virtual engineering to understand the problem, develop a different, new and unique solution and optimize it through Numerical Free Shape Optimization. Changing the contour reduced surface stress by 24%, which delivered a major improvement in construction integrity.