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Industry Summary Articles

Friday, August 31, 2018

Generative Design Impacting Product Development

By Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., CIMdata and Ted Blacker, Ph.D., Sandia National Labs

Generative design and PLM are transforming product innovation

Generative design and additive manufacturing have been maturing for many years in R&D activities and are now moving toward widespread use. Designers using them often come up with startlingly new products. However, industry has just begun to converge these innovative technologies to gain their full benefits. As convergence progresses, their synergy will be leveraged in surprising and even astounding ways.

Introduction
Generative design is a set of tools that will create or modify designs based on their performance requirements and design constraints. One of the key tools supporting generative design is topology optimization (TopOpt).Teams at Sandia Laboratories led by Dr. Ted Blacker are driving these tools for innovation into practical use. They are striving toward what Sandia calls “productionized” tools that will move TopOpt from an intriguing R&D concept to practical commercialization.

Both of these technologies continuously forge into new application domains. Much of the current excitement is over the way that TopOpt generates better designs that are manufacturable with Additive Manufacturing (AM), even if not by conventional means. This was covered in a CIMdata webinar that is available for download.

Sandia is exploring advanced TopOpt tools in its Plato project, where topology optimization is being much more tightly linked to advanced physics, to produce directly printable parts, and to take advantage of new hardware architectures in CPUs. We urge design engineers and product developers to explore Generative design and TopOpt efforts at both Sandia and CIMdata, mentioned in the PDF below.

The convergence of generative design and AM is the logical next step amid two long-running transformations. These transformations are the digitalization of the enterprise’s information (e.g., master data) and much of its assets (such as intellectual property) and the platformization of virtually all enterprise toolsets.

A third element in this transformational convergence is Advanced Materials, many of which are quite novel; new ones appear almost daily. The three domains are visualized in Figure 1. 

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