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Summary

Renishaw, is a world leading engineering and scientific technology company supplying industrial automation and process control solutions and services . Renishaw wanted to move away from an STL-centric file import process and its limitations while minimizing engineering effort.

Renishaw’s move to Spatial’s 3D ACIS Modeler offered world-class healing, advanced modeling, and a quantum leap in editing capabilities. Spatial’s high quality SDKs allowed Renishaw to pave the way to future CAD functionality.

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The Company

Renishaw is an established world leader in engineering technologies, with a strong history of innovation in product development and manufacturing. Today, this history of innovation extends to the design, development and production of advanced metal additive manufacturing systems for direct manufacturing of 3D-printed metallic components.

Prior to 3D printing, it is necessary to generate the printer’s laser scan paths that fuse the powder layers to each other to additively form a part. Build preparation software is thus key to generating the high-quality part builds. To maximize build quality on its own printers and to provide its industrial customers with a simple UI in which to orient, support and set build parameters, Renishaw has developed its own build preparation tool – QuantAM. 

QuantAM is designed specifically for Renishaw AM platforms, providing tight integration to the machine control software and the ability to accurately and rapidly review all build files prior to production.

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The Challenge

Move Away from STL-Centric File Import

Digitally driven additive manufacturing systems require a file preparation stage to take the original CAD geometry and format it into a machine-readable build file. The most common CAD export format is stereolithography (STL). The STL format describes a surface as a collection of connected triangles — the more complex a surface is, the larger number of triangles that are needed to define that surface.

While STL import has served the industry well, there are several limitations with this format:

  • Regardless of the number of triangles used to describe a surface, it is still an approximation, for example, a sphere described as a collection of triangles can only approach the accuracy of a parameterized model of a sphere (and never achieve the simplicity of the description).
  • If the wrong triangle density is chosen at the time of export, it can have an impact on the resulting print quality. An end user has to have a good understanding of what the print resolution of the equipment is.
  • Because an STL representation is an approximation, it both limits and complicates the ability to edit the model.
  • Errors in translating the intent of the model, with any fixes being manual and less than perfect.
  • A fixed/repaired model diverges from the original, complicating keeping specifications in sync.
  • No support for product and manufacturing information (PMI).
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The Solution

Robust and Native Modeling Kernel

New for QuantAM 2017, Renishaw’s software engineering group architected a major overhaul to their current platform.
With the help of Spatial’s technical team, Renishaw have integrated two key components into
QuantAM: the 3D ACIS Modeler with CGM Polyhedra and 3D InterOp.

Moving to the ACIS Modeling Kernel

A major change to the QuantAM solution was to move to the ACIS modeling kernel and away from the reliance solely on an STL representation of the model. This move to a native modeling kernel delivers significant advantages to both Renishaw and their customers.

World-Class Healing

3D ACIS Modeler provides access to a powerful set of functions and routines that can handle these tough modeling problems of stitching, geometry simplification and gap tightening. The 3D ACIS Modeler add-on, CGM Polyhedra, provides QuantAM access to robust and powerful polygonal healing capabilities on tessellated data — an important capability because STL imported data is often imperfect, obscuring the intent of the model.

Advanced Modeling

By using CGM Polyhedra and the 3D ACIS Modeler, QuantAM now benefits from precise B-rep and polyhedral hybrid modeling capabilities. For example, CGM Polyhedra can recognize canonic surfaces, such as planes, cylinders, cones, toroids, and spheres in an STL model, converting these structures to precise representations, and thus preserving the intent of the original model.

Quantum Leap in Editing Capabilities

Because the imported data now exists as a true 3D hybrid model, geometric modifications, edits and corrections can be made to the hybrid model. This updated model can be fed back upstream to the original design team, enabling them to review any changes made to make the part manufacturable. This new flow made possible by the 3D ACIS Modeler enables model-based engineering, where the model is the specification, allowing for any changes made in manufacturing to be fed back to the entire system.

Integrating 3D InterOp

With 3D InterOp, QuantAM can now import many new modeling formats, enabling Renishaw to support additional customers and workflows, including all major CAD providers and associated formats. By adding support for the native formats of other CAD systems, QuantAM can import the original design intent, bringing in not only the geometry data, but also the product structure and assembly, graphical representation, and PMI.

The Results

Complementary Set of Capabilities

From a business perspective, collaborating with Spatial provides Renishaw with a complementary set of capabilities and highlights the benefits of this long standing, productive working relationship. From an engineering perspective, Renishaw gains a robust solution tested on thousands of datasets from hundreds of customers. The team benefits from the Spatial engineering team’s years of experience in dealing with 3D modeling as well as translating CAD databases from various vendors while preserving design intent.

As a result, the team does not have to deal with the usual issues when rolling out new code to customers. Moreover, due to the maturity and robustness of the solution set, the number of support issues is greatly reduced. Renishaw’s customers benefit from any code fixes and improvements needed by the Spatial community.

Key Insights

Spatial’s SDKs are industry-leading for a reason.
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Solutions

As a result, the team does not have to deal with the usual issues when rolling out new code to customers. Moreover, due to the maturity and robustness of the solution set, the number of support issues is greatly reduced. Renishaw’s customers benefit from any code fixes and improvements needed by the Spatial community.