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Additive Manufacturing

As a Siemens Smart Expert accredited partner for Additive Manufacturing deployments throughout the UK and Ireland, we offer a robust portfolio of software allowing you to execute the entire additive manufacturing process from design to production. 

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What is Additive Manufacturing?

Additive manufacturing is the process of creating an object by building it one layer at a time. It is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing, in which an object is created by cutting away at a solid block of material until the final product is complete. Technically, additive manufacturing can refer to any process where a product is created by building something up, such as molding, but it typically refers to 3-D printing. Additive manufacturing presents a tremendous opportunity to improve products by making them more cost-effective to produce, and, therefore, less expensive for the consumer.

How Additive Manufacturing Works

To create an object using additive manufacturing, someone must first create a design. This is typically done using computer aided design, or CAD, software, or by taking a scan of the object someone wants to print. Software then translates the design into a layer by layer framework for the additive manufacturing machine to follow. 

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What are the benefits of Additive Manufacturing?

Additive manufacturing presents a tremendous opportunity to improve products by making them more cost-effective to produce, and, therefore, less expensive for the consumer. Additive manufacturing provides results that relate to most industries and processes by reducing final product weight, power consumption, and material usage. It also minimises costs and environmental impact via fewer materials needed for production ‒ substantial benefits that any manufacturing company would welcome.​​​

Save on Costs, Material Waste and Energy

Smaller, Faster Production Runs & Less Inventory

Easier to Recreate and Optimise Legacy Parts

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More Control and Options Over The End Result

Learn more about our additive manufacturing solutions:

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Design for additive manufacturing

 AM expands the possibilities for product design, allowing for topology optimized parts, lattice structures, meshing and geometric patterns

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Additive Manufacturing 

Build process simulation

Simulate the build process prior to printing, anticipating distortion and automatically generating the corrected geometry.

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Multi-Axis Additive Deposition

Produce state-of-the-art designs with Multi-Axis Deposition, allowing you to create multi-axis additive manufacturing toolpaths. 

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Siemens AM Network

Learn more about how you can maximize your design and engineering potential with NX’s cutting-edge toolkit of additive design capabilities and Siemens AM Network.

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Manage your additive process from order to shipment

To maximise the efficiency of additive manufacturing production, the process must be well managed.  The Managing additive manufacturing production goes beyond taking orders and filling them. To get the most from your additive manufacturing investment, you need to track materials, maximise printer uptime, and manage the entire process from order to shipment with maximum efficiency.

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Process Collaboration​​

Leverage the Siemens Additive Manufacturing Network, an online order-to-delivery collaboration platform for the industrial additive manufacturing (AM) community. It connects the additive ecosystem, simplifies the collaboration process and streamlines the print production process. The network digitises and consistently improves your processes, ultimately accelerating the value of using additive manufacturing.

Scheduling and Monitoring

​Implement Opcenter solutions to manage your AM production through scheduling, execution and monitoring. Get full operational visibility to ensure optimal quality and efficiency. You can also use Opcenter solutions to visualise material flow throughout a facility. This helps ensure you are using the proper mix of recycled and virgin material for the various print jobs you execute throughout the factory.

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Quality and Analytics

​Get the most from AM through a quality process that includes a strong set of internet of things (IoT) and analytics solutions. Siemens Insights Hub provides the ability to monitor the AM process, analyze the resulting data, and act upon that data with part and process improvements. This closed feedback loop allows you to feed insights back into upstream phases of the additive manufacturing process, optimising next-generation innovation.​​

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Siemens AM Use Case

​Utilize scans of physical objects to engineer and 3D print individualized products

Value:

•Personalize products

•Economically produce lot sizes of one part

•Expedite reverse engineering of parts

 

Key capabilities:

•Convergent ModelingTM – standard CAD tools work with mixed facet and precise geometry

•Linked, smart model-driven process from scan to printed part

Industries: medical, aerospace, heavy equipment, industrial machinery, energy

Complete Workflow: Lattice Design, Additive Build Prep, Simulation & Machining of a Femoral Implant

Watch more about Additive below

Bugatti Additive Manufacturing Process I Siemens NX and Simcenter
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Bugatti Additive Manufacturing Process I Siemens NX and Simcenter

Additive Manufacturing and Innovation for Automotive: Pushing the Limits of Performance. Utilizing the power of an integrated product development software platform, the already lightweight Bugatti Chiron wing system was further reduced in weight by 50% while maintaining its same rigidity. This was accomplished by combining 3D printed titanium components, made using SLM, and carbon fiber reinforced tubes. Visitors to the Hannover Messe can see the optimized rear-wing hydraulic system on display in Hall 6 at the Siemens PLM Software booth J30. Accelerating the innovation process by 10X using Siemens’ digital innovation platform, including NX and Simcenter capabilities for generative design, composite design, and multi-physics simulation, the optimized aerodynamics control system results in reduced weight and aerodynamic drag for enhanced vehicle performance.
Implicit Modeling for Lattice-based Engineered Structures
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Implicit Modeling for Lattice-based Engineered Structures

Implicit modeling allows you to create complex structures. With this new implicit modeling module, users can create the kinds of natural structures that are proving so valuable in the development of additive manufacturing—optimizing their designs for such advantages as lightweighting, thermal flow, energy absorption, and 3D printing efficiency. And because the module is tightly connected within the AM design environment, model changes—even for features as complex as these engineered structures—are quickly and easily accomplished. While there may be niche software packages that can support TPMS modeling, none are woven as seamlessly into the end-to-end AM digital thread as NX’s new implicit modeling module.
Simcenter 3D – The Key to Avoiding Failure is Prediction
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Simcenter 3D – The Key to Avoiding Failure is Prediction

When it comes to predicting the performance of additively manufactured parts, Siemens has you covered. We’ve been working on a new multiscale analysis tool that can help our customers predict the durability of a 3D printed part. While the simulation of homogeneous materials and some heterogeneous materials, like metals, is well established and robust, analysis of newer more advanced heterogeneous materials is lagging. In general, simulation using conventional, standard FEA techniques cannot simulate these materials without extensive up-front calibration. Therefore, usage of these materials results in increased time to market and increased costs. In this case, a local scale model of the microstructure is combined with a global scale model of the part being analyzed. These two analyses are performed simultaneously and the results from one model affect the behavior of the other. This method of solving each domain individually and then linking the results is orders of magnitude faster than solving for the entire model at the resolution necessary to capture the relevant details.
Simcenter HEEDS - Automated Design Exploration Enables Multi-Objective AM Part Optimization
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Simcenter HEEDS - Automated Design Exploration Enables Multi-Objective AM Part Optimization

For many companies, design for AM extends no further than structural topology optimization—developing the lightest weight part within a design envelope to meet structural load requirements. The problem is, most parts must fulfill a host of engineering and business objectives, from fluid flow, thermal and vibration requirements to cost demands. It’s one thing to optimize a part for one objective, but how can you optimize for several objectives all at once—while meeting your deadline? HEEDS is a design space exploration solution that automates the process of finding the design concepts that best achieve a multiplicity of performance requirements. The software can run through hundreds of designs in a matter of minutes. And it helps users visualize design performance trade-offs between competing objectives and constraints, with various plots, tables, and graphs. With an extensive list of developed interfaces to commercial CAD, CAE and other tools, HEEDS quickly and easily integrates many technologies without the need for custom scripting.
Automating 3D Printing Build Preparation
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Automating 3D Printing Build Preparation

Automated print preparation in Siemens software One of the biggest areas where our customers are calling for more automation is in the build preparation process. Once customers have designed an AM part, validated its 3D printability and defined its orientation, they want to be able to push a button, populate their AM machine build trays with an optimal quantity of parts—and know that the output is going to meet expectations. This can be now be accomplished with NX AM software. You can write a script capturing your workflow in an NX Journal file—including 3D printer choice (polymer or metal), part positioning, scaling, support creation (if necessary), output generation, labeling and reporting. Then you can replay this NX Journal file, altering any of these parameters. Here’s a simple example of NX automated build preparation in action:

Expert led NX Additive Manufacturing Training Courses

Let us help you make the most out of your NX software investment.

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Expert led NX Additive Manufacturing Training Courses

Let us help you make the most out of your additive manufacturing software investment.

Contact us to get started with Additive Manufacturing

So if you want to learn how additive manufacturing  enables your engineering team to reduce the time to market and lower production costs, why not book a discovery call with us and our partners at Siemens Digital Industries Software.   

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