Cases

At Dyson we manufacture vacuum cleaners with a strong emphasis on innovation, with the goal of creating increasingly sophisticated machines. With everyone at Dyson constantly coming up with suggestions and concepts, our design team needs to create physical prototypes to help them better evaluate these new ideas. Once we obtain designs from our CAD software, we fix the file in Magics and then use the SmartSpace module to pack the parts on our EOS P700 LS machine.

Nesting up to 300 parts collision-free in three hours

We were already using the 32-bit version of Magics when an application engineer from Materialise’ Malaysian office came over to better understand how we were using the software and to give us a clearer insight to SmartSpace. SmartSpace is an additional module of Magics RP which increases the capacity of sintering machines by automatically nesting parts in 3D. The Materialise engineer really demonstrated what a difference SmartSpace could make for us. The average number of parts we pack on one build envelope ranges from 100 to 300. Before buying SmartSpace, we arranged all parts manually, which took us about six hours. With SmartSpace, nesting the same parts collision-free only takes us three hours, which is a 50% decrease in the time spent. Since we really pack our build envelopes to the maximum, SmartSpace is an indispensable tool, giving our productivity an enormous boost.

In general we start off by using Magics to measure, check and fix parts. Then we use Magics’ SmartSpace module to nest the parts automatically in the most optimal way. By reducing the build height, SmartSpace decreases the build time and helps us to pack more parts in the same build envelope than before. We usually nest smaller parts manually. Once we’ve placed all parts in the build envelope, we initiate the collision detection. The software automatically checks for colliding or interlocking parts, highlighting possible problem areas in a few seconds, which eliminates the necessity for inspecting the entire nested build envelope personally. After slicing, we generate a part report in Magics with information on size, volume and surface of the platform and a list of all the nested parts.

Easily taking on 120 MB

In addition to purchasing SmartSpace, we also upgraded to the 64-bit version of Magics to cope with the number and size of the parts that we build. As a real power user, we immediately took the opportunity to request Magics 64-bit Beta testing. Ever since we started using the 64-bit version of Magics, we’ve found that we can consistently deliver the same high quality. Even when automatically nesting build envelopes of 50 to 120 MB, we can completely rely on the software to generate the most optimal packing. Before, using SmartSpace for the automatic detection of colliding parts in a fully loaded EOS P700 build envelope caused the software to hang, because of the memory limit of a 32- bit system. That’s all over. I’m really glad Materialise offered us this solution just in time.