Materialise has partnered with HCL Technologies (HCL) to develop a platform that provides increased integration for hybrid manufacturing. With this collaboration, CAMWorksR software from HCL will be Powered by Materialise AM technology to facilitate the production of metal parts, combining the benefits of AM freedom of design with the speed and accuracy of CNC machining. The partnership also represents the first initiative to provide an integrated CAD/CAM solution for hybrid manufacturing in a SOLIDWORKSR environment. This new technology is expected to be available for release later this year.
Hybrid manufacturing is a technology that bridges the benefits of subtractive and additive processes to produce parts of complex design and close tolerance. The integration of AM and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) software in one platform will facilitate the traceability of the production process while saving redundant manual work. Users of the new CAMWorks AM module Powered by Materialise, will be able to create support structures directly in CAMWorks and interface with the main metal printers via the Materialise Build Processor.
“The market space and applicability of the Additive Manufacturing technology has been growing dramatically in the past 5 years. Integration with current manufacturing systems is the next step to unlock digital transformations in manufacturing,” says Stefaan Motte, Vice President of Software at Materialise. “This requires in-depth understanding of both subtractive and additive processes. We are certain that companies adopting hybrid manufacturing will benefit greatly from this collaboration, which combines our 30 years of experience in AM with the CAM expertise of HCL.”
GH Rao, President of Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) at HCL Technologies said “We are very excited with the new partnership and the potential hybrid manufacturing offers to the future of computer-aided design and manufacturing. By combining advanced integrated CAM technology from HCL with the innovative 3D printing technology from Materialise, we look forward to enabling companies to create innovative products which can be brought to the market faster and at a lower cost.”
Materialise, a global leader in 3D printing software and services, was founded in 1990 and has been enabling companies all over the world to explore the extraordinary potential of 3D Printing. The Materialise Magics 3D Print Suite provides users with tools of unparalleled functionality to prepare, optimize, and manage the full Additive Manufacturing (AM) process to get the most out of their 3D printers. Materialise is also a leading additive manufacturing service provider and offers design and engineering, co-creation, and rapid prototyping services as well as additive software solutions for specific medical applications.
The portfolio of HCL Technologies includes IP products such as CAMWorks®, DFMPro®, Glovius, etc. Recently released SOLIDWORKS® CAM is Powered by CAMWorks and is a powerful, fully embedded CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) system included in the latest release of SOLIDWORKS® 2018. CAMWorks extends the SOLIDWORKS Smart Manufacturing ecosystem by providing the most advanced technology available for 3, 4, and 5 axis milling, turning, and mill-turn CNC programming directly inside SOLIDWORKS; and DFMPro is the most advanced automatic design for manufacturability assessment tool available.
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