nTopology, EOS Bring Implicit Interop to AM

nTopology, engineering design software developer, and EOS, an industrial 3D printing company, announced they are proceeding with the development of a new Implicit Interop capability, to help solve a bottleneck in the additive manufacturing (AM) workflow by allowing the transfer of complex designs in megabyte-sized files, quickening the time to manufacturing, the companies report.

File sizes for output to 3D printers can exceed 10s of gigabytes, but nTopology, and EOS, have created a new nTop Implicit File that can result in smaller file sizes, faster file generation and  faster load time—making it more readily available to AM build preparation software for manufacturing, the companies note.

nTopology will provide an Implicit Interop plug-in for EOS customers that is compatible with EOSPRINT 2.14, expected to release in June 2023.

To spur broader adoption of their Implicit Interop technology, nTopology and EOS are working with the 3MF Consortium on the standardization of the Implicit File format. It is expected that the technology will be incorporated in a future update to the 3MF industry-standard 3D printing file format.

“nTopology has opened up design freedom and enabled engineers to design products that they weren’t able to do before. This has led to even more complex designs that have led them to uncover design data bottlenecks in printing those designs. With our focus on being a useful tool for engineers —to not just design but produce these parts—we worked with EOS to come up with a solution to enable these complex parts to be printed,” states Bradley Rothenberg, nTopology co-founder and CEO.

“With modern design approaches such as topology optimization, generative design and DfAM on the rise, the complexity of part geometries has been skyrocketing. Discretization of such complex models often results in meshes with file sizes greater than several gigabytes, which can make them very challenging to handle in later production steps,” says Alexander Bockstaller, software product line manager at EOS. “EOS tackles the problem and drives the standardization of implicit geometry representation, which makes it possible to build designs that were previously unbuildable.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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