Automatic Support Generation by netfabb Improves Industrial AM Metal Parts

German 3D printing software supplier netfabb has just announced the release of a new add-on for the netfabb Professional 6 suite they say will simplify and improve 3D printing processes on an industrial scale – Support Structures.

The Support Structures add-on is specially designed to create advanced support generation for Selective Laser Melting, Stereolithography, and DLP technologies, and it will allow netfabb Professional 6 users to easily add support lattices and structures to parts for additive manufacturing processes.

The add-on creates bar support structures and adjusts the anchor points between the part and the build platform as needed to ensure that the full productive capability of AM machines.

This new functionality comes in a pair of variants: netfabb DLP Support Structures and Enhanced Support Structures for manufacturing on machines using Selective Laser Melting (SLM), Stereolithography (SLA), and FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling).

The 3D printing software giant recently announced the foundation of the 3MF Consortium, and in conjunction with together with Microsoft, HP, Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, Shapeways, and SLM Solutions, the group of industry market leaders have joined forces to create the open – and royalty-free – 3MF format. As the lead of the consortium’s technical working group, netfabb says 3MF will be fully suported in all of their products.

This latest add-on will offer three types of support structures as required by a given part’s geometry.

The three types — bar support, polyline support, and full volume support — include a “huge number of features and options to grant full flexibility to the designer.”

According to netfabb, the different types of support structures can be combined on the same model, applied to different part areas and even to different angles. The structures can include curved and ramified bars which look a bit like the branches of a tree.

The Polyline support feature allows for the creation of a “structured wall” in just by a few clicks, and “volume support” extends the Polyline support feature by offering some 37 different settings in total.

Practical features such as a transparent part view and an overview list of support entities are aimed at easing a designer’s workload, and an automatic downskin analysis of data models to determine which areas require some support round out the application details.

“netfabb Professional 6 has the potential to lift additive manufacturing to an unprecedented level of volume manufacturing,” says Ulf Lindhe, the Director of Business Development at netfabb. “Risk reduction, easy maintenance, process reliability, and a whole lot of time savings are the keywords to describe the benefits of using netfabb software.”

What do you think of this new add-on for netfabb Professional 6? Will your work processes by simplified with the addition of Suport Structures? Let us know in the Automated Support Structured forum thread on 3DPB.com.