Position Papers

The ExOne Company announced today its latest 3D printing system, Innovent™, designed especially for research and education customers.   Innovent, ExOne’s industrial-grade, laboratory-sized machine, allows for testing material properties, specifically in educational institutions, research laboratories, and research and development (R&D) departments at commercial organizations. Innovent is uniquely designed in that it balances a specific build box for the technical qualification of materials with a smaller overall lab machine platform size, when compared to other industrial-grade 3D printers.   “Innovent expands upon ExOne’s lab machine offerings by allowing customers, whether they are educators or companies, the ability to qualify materials, an option not previously available in these types of 3D printers,” said S. Kent Rockwell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for ExOne. “ExOne is improving its laboratory solution to help drive the overall industrial sector towards increased experience with and use of binder jetting 3D printing.”   Compared to the company’s previous lab model,

Altium Limited has announced an update to their next-generation enterprise data management and collaboration platform - Altium Vault®2.1. By centralizing, managing and formalizing the component libraries, design data and team collaboration using the Altium Vault, design teams will be able to achieve significant productivity improvements and reduce potentially costly errors. "Proper design data management remains a key factor in successful product launches, both in terms of budget and timeline targeting", noted Nikolay Ponomarenko, Product Manager for Altium. "With this update, we’ve implemented a lot of improvements and feature enhancements as requested by our customers so they can pull even further ahead of their competition.” Released in June 2014, Altium Vault 2.0 manages product versions and releases, design reuse and design library management, provides a platform for real-time collaboration, and even manages installation deployment and configuration. Altium Vault 2.1 improves workflow and usability for day-to-day operations saving even more time and reducing the

French apparel manufacturer Lafodex SA® has implemented YuniquePLM™ to accelerate their workflow and reduce errors. Lafodex chose to standardize the design and manufacturing processes throughout their operations by incorporating YuniquePLM along with a fully integrated ERP system. YuniquePLM, designed specifically for the fashion and retail industries, features robust functionality in a web-based platform that seamlessly integrates with various ERP systems. Teams around the world can communicate more effectively, accelerate their workflows and reduce errors. Lafodex manufactures high-quality professional and protective wear for working environments. Prior to implementation of YuniquePLM, the company used spreadsheets and other written documents to manage their product line. Because much of the information was disparate, effective collaboration was difficult to achieve, with data often entered more than once. Lafodex chose the Yunique system to improve collaboration and meet its growing technical and design objectives. Lafodex implemented the YuniquePLM solution concurrently with its new ERP system. "Using YuniquePLM for pre-production and quality

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has recently placed an order for COMSOL Multiphysics® simulation software and a selection of its add-on products for the modeling and simulation of measurement systems. The licenses will be used by research teams across the technical areas covered by NPL to support their work developing and validating measurement techniques. For over a century, NPL has developed and maintained primary measurement standards for the UK’s National Measurement System. NPL is committed to using cutting-edge science and technology tools to ensure the accuracy and consistency of measurement used by government, business, and society. The expanded offering of COMSOL Multiphysics and its application-specific products will enable engineers at NPL to broaden their research to include additional multiphysics effects, and will aid in the expansion of research into new areas and applications. “NPL is pleased to be able to expand its relationship with COMSOL,” says Louise Wright, Principal Research Scientist, Mathematics &

The Edgecam computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) solution by Vero Software will be exhibited Feb. 8-11 at SOLIDWORKS World 2015, scheduled to take place at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Designed as a forum for learning to work more quickly and efficiently, SOLIDWORKS World offers participants educational and networking opportunities, as well as the chance to see cutting-edge technologies. Conference participants are encouraged to learn more about Edgecam at Booth No. 400 in the SOLIDWORKS Partner Pavilion, where presentations of the time-saving features in Edgecam will be made available. One-on-one demonstrations will highlight the ease of interoperability between SOLID-WORKS and Edgecam, as well as new and enhanced features available within the latest re-lease of Edgecam. Among the latest upgrades is Edgecam Workflow, the market leading software application specifically designed for manufacturers to reduce costs, improve quality and achieve shorter lead times. Workflow understands the component topology and understands the required manufacturing environment, therefore accelerating toolpath

SimScale has reached a milestone of 10,000 users on its web-based 3D engineering simulation platform, the company revealed in an announcement today. SimScale also released the latest platform version, including new finite element analysis capabilities, multiple user interface improvements and several new online tutorials. SimScale already has users from 190 countries. The users are engineers and designers simulating a wide range of products in various industries, using structural, fluid flow, thermal and acoustic simulation methods. For example, Custom Machines is an engineering design consultancy in Ballarat, Australia, that specializes in machine design for a broad range of industries including mining, rolling stock, confectionery, agriculture and manufacturing. For their recent project, the SimScale platform was used to optimize the design of a custom-made load cell. “We had some difficult design constraints on this project, including a short time-to-market, tight budget and complex mechanical loading to deal with,” said Ben Lewis, president at Custom Machines. “The powerful

Autodesk Inc. announced the launch of its Cleantech Partner Program in mainland China. This launch represents a key milestone in the expansion of the Autodesk Cleantech Partner Program, as China will become the fastest growing Cleantech market in the next decade. By providing local innovators access to a software portfolio of unparalleled breadth and depth, such as Digital Prototyping, the Autodesk Cleantech Partner Program supports emerging Chinese Cleantech companies to address some of the world’s most challenging environmental problems and create a better and more sustainable world. Following launches in Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, China is the fifth country in Asia Pacific to offer the program. The program is open to all early-stage innovative Cleantech companies in China, including those specializing in solar energy, fuel cells, biomass, wind energy, tidal energy, energy-efficiency, mobility and carbon reduction services. The China Industrial Energy Conservation and Cleaner Production Association (CIECCPA) is entering a strategic cooperation with

Workshop will take place at the Caterpillar Visitor Center in Peoria, Illinois on April 29 &30 ANN ARBOR, Michigan, 22 January 2015—CIMdata, Inc., the leading global PLM strategic management consulting and research firm announces that CIMdata’s Simulation & Analysis Knowledge Council will present a workshop on the topic of “Leveraging Simulation for Competitive Advantage.” The workshop will take place in Peoria, Illinois and will run over two consecutive half days. The workshop will start during the afternoon of April 29 and will end on April 30. A personal tour of Caterpillar’s visitor center and museum will be part of the first afternoon’s highlights. Throughout the workshop CIMdata’s Simulation & Analysis Knowledge Council and a select group of leading-edge users will share how they have been able to create a competitive advantage by deploying simulation and analysis to facilitate product and manufacturing system development. The workshop, now in its twelfth year, will once

TraceParts has recently added 6 new CAD formats to its growing list of supported formats. The newest CAD additions to the TracePartsOnline.net platform include PLY, COLLADA, OFF, WAVEFRONT OBJ, VTK and THREE JS, among several more, opening a new world of possibilities to a community of design professionals for rendering, gaming or 3D animation purposes. These formats join an established group of long supported formats for all the most popular native CAD software including SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, Pro/ENGINEER & Creo, Inventor, AutoCAD, Solid Edge, TopSolid, Geomagic Design, Kompas 3D, SpaceClaim, SketchUp, Autodesk REVIT, ZW3D, Draftsight, HiCAD, TurboCAD, T-FLEX. TracePartsOnline.net offers a robust solution to shorten product development time by offering both native and neutral CAD formats, providing interoperability and versatility for use with any CAD software from design to manufacture. "With the vast range of formats we now support on TracePartsOnline.net, designers and engineers have the utmost flexibility when downloading a model using whatever

TFTLabs S.A.S, announces in this latest release, the support of new SolidWorks 2015 for company products TFTWeb, TFTPad, TFT4iT and free JSON3D Gallery. The free JSON3D Gallery, http://json3d.tftlabs.com, which already supports CATIA V5, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and JT formats, has been updated to support SolidWorks 2015 as well. TFTLabs products support all major 3D formats, which now include latest release of CAD System, Dassault Systems / SolidWorks 2015.  Entities treated: Assemblies, parts, Visibilities, colors, transparency, Attributes on parts and assemblies All 3D entities File extensions: .sldprt, .sldasm, “In CAD interoperability business, the #1 customer requirement is the responsiveness in delivering updates compatible with the latest versions of any CAD format. This is also our #1 priority for the 20+ formats we support and, thanks to our Web software available on most popular Web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Deployment to end-users is instantaneous and transparent. Check it out with our free JSON3D Gallery starting today!” says Francois Chretien, CEO and