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For different applications there are different priorities and for some the manufacturability is specially high. Therefore, it would be nice to push Designs designs in a direction where the manufacturing gets easier without costing to much performance regarding the efficient Design design and material allocation.
For this use case an experimental function is implemented which takes the needed support for additive manufacturing into account while optimising the part. The function got 3 three different methods strategies which could be used. Each has some own characteristics and can be the best option for a part. The three different methods strategies are:
Passive
Reactive
Active
The influence of the Support Reduction on the design increases from passive to reactive to active.
For the second and for the third method strategy a second value can be defined, the intensity. The Intensity can be chosen between 1 and 10, where 1 is very low and 10 is very high. Take in mind that a very high intensity could lead to a slower performance and unusual results. It is recommended to start with the first method strategy and use the other two together with the intensity if the results are not satisfying.
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In the next images an example part is used to display the difference between results of the methodsstrategies.
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View from underneath wit the corresponding support structures in Simufact Additive:
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To use this function the Advanced User Settings need to be used due to the fact that this function is still experimental. In these either one or two command need to be added, depending on the setting you choose. The first one is the supportReductionMode. You can select the required one with the command:
schedule.prefabricated.supportReductionMode = passive |
For the two other options (Reactive and Active) there is also another parameter that can be used to define how strong the support reduction needs to be. The value can be configured with the following command:
schedule.prefabricated.supportReductionIntensity = 5 |
5 is also the default value if you don’t specify one. Note that a high value for the intensity most likely puts more additional material on the design to reduce the support of the part.
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The build direction is z by default. If you want to use another direction than that you have to rotate the part. The only exception to this are symmetrical Designs, for them the build direction is the positive z direction if of the symmetry coordinate system.
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