Support Reduction - Experimental Function

General Explanation

For different applications there are different priorities and for some the manufacturability is specially high. Therefore, it would be nice to push designs in a direction where the manufacturing gets easier without costing to much performance regarding the efficient 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 three different strategies which could be used. The three different 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 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 strategy and use the other two together with the intensity if the results are not satisfying.

Tip: Use the Shape Quality “Fine Tune” to get better results and get rid of artifacts that can occur during the support reduction

In the next images an example part is used to display the difference between results of the strategies.

View from underneath wit the corresponding support structures in Simufact Additive:

In the following graph the interaction between the part volume and the support volume is illustrated. You can see the little amount of extra volume can reduce a high amount of the support but also that the most active mode needs significant more material. Note that these is only one example that illustrates how the support reduction could look like, but this differs between different parts and tasks. So feel motivated to try the different modes to find the ideal one for your specific part.

How to use…

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:

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:

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.

Build direction

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 of the symmetry coordinate system.

You might also be interested in this tutorial:

• Support Reduction - Gripper