Prime Cuts: The ultimate pedalo
Published 26 May 2011
Posted by Stephen Holmes
Design challenges often involve safety but facing giant waves, possible typhoons, occasional icebergs and likely interest from monster sharks in nothing more than a pedalo requires some specialist thought.
The Torepedalo is the result of over a year of design work: a fast, stable boat that cuts well through the water and the air. At over eight metres long, it’s huge for a pedalo but tiny for a place for two people to live for over six weeks.
Not only will it be packed with all the needed supplies and equipment, but it has some serious design clout behind it too.
Automakers cut engineering simulation times using GPU-accelerated Abaqus FEA
Published 25 May 2011
Posted by Greg Corke
Nvidia’s Tesla C2070 sits inside a workstation or server and features 448 CUDA cores and 6GB memory dedicated for GPU compute
Two of the largest automakers in Europe are evaluating Nvidia’s GPU compute technology for analysing the structural behaviour of large engine models.
Testing in Abaqus 6.11, the latest release the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) product suite from Dassault’s Simulia, Nvidia’s Quadro and Tesla Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), coupled with Intel Xeon CPUs, were said to run Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulations twice as fast as with CPUs alone.
Add comment (0 comments)
Job of the week: The Alloy
Published 25 May 2011
Posted by Stephen Holmes
Product Designer at The Alloy
Job Type: Permanent
Industry Sector: Product development and manufacturing
Software Packages: AutoCAD
Location: Farnham, Surrey
Big-time UK design firm The Alloy is seeking a designer with a high degree of creativity, commitment and professionalism for its major accounts.
You should have at least five years of experience and a proven track record, ideally in consultancy where you can demonstrate that you have already enjoyed effective relationships with your clients where you were empathic and understood their experiences and viewpoints.
There’s going to be a lot of interest in this one people, so get in there quick! Apply here.
We have a mass of cool design and engineering jobs ready and waiting for you - Click here to browse through for your new career!
Add comment (0 comments)
DEVELOP3D puts new AMD FirePro V5900 graphics card through its paces
Published 25 May 2011
Posted by Greg Corke
AMD’s FirePro V5900 can deliver exceptional performance in 3D CAD applications when given the chance.
Being a journalist is not the glamorous life you may think. I spent most of yesterday in a darkened room testing the new AMD FirePro V5900 graphics card. You can read about my findings here.
With a list price of $599 the FirePro V5900 is targeted squarely at the CAD market and offers an exciting proposition for those who work with applications and datasets that aren’t limited by the speed of the CPU, including Catia, NX, and 3ds Max.
Add comment (0 comments)
3D Systems: gearing up for the mainstreaming of 3D printing
Published 24 May 2011
Posted by Al Dean
3D Systems is a fascinating organisation. They kicked off the rapid prototyping industry when Chuck Hull invented and commercialised Stereolithography (SLA) technology and brought it to market in 1986. This, for those unaware, uses a combination of lasers and higher-end optics to cure layer after layer of photo curable resin. It also developed the STL format that’s become synonymous with rapid prototyping as the means of outputting triangulated meshes from your CAD system.
As many involved in rapid prototyping will know the industry has been through rapid development in the last 6 or 7 years. Materials have very quickly advanced from brittle, UV sensitive materials into true wonders of material engineering. Look at the Bluestone material, again a photo-curable material, but it’s a nano-composite that delivers incredible stiffness and exemplary surface finish.
Along the way, there have been interesting diversions. The company acquired Desktop Factory a couple of years ago, a company that seemed to flounder on its promise of bringing truly desktop, affordable 3D printing to market. It also experimented with new process, such as the Optoform process, which uses the same laser+optics process, but to cure very stiff ceramic material - I saw one of the beta test machines at Renault F1’s head quarters and the parts it built were incredible.
View comments (6 comments)
Prime Cuts: New 3D camera to help heal old wounds
Published 20 May 2011
Posted by Tanya Weaver
Healthcare providers in the developed world spend $40 billion per annum on wound management. That is huge and is set to rise.
Until now, the conventional approach to wound monitoring, which involves using photographs to assess how the wound is healing over time, has been manually intensive and difficult to quantify.
Having recognised that its imaging solutions could provide a breakthrough in this specialist field of wound care, Eykona Technologies approached electronic product designers Triteq to help them develop an entirely new 3D imaging system. The system would use a 3D camera and imaging software to record, layer and manipulate wound images.
View comments (2 comments)
Autodesk to take next step in the automatic creation of 3D models from photographs
Published 17 May 2011
Posted by Greg Corke
A Nike sneaker recreated as a mesh in Photofly - as previewed at Autodesk University in December 2010
Next Thursday Autodesk is due to update The Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly, one of the most exciting technology previews we’ve seen on its Labs website.
For those that don’t know, Project Photofly automatically converts photographs shot around an object or a scene into a 3D model. This new version will be able to create textured meshes rather than just point clouds.
Add comment (0 comments)
View comments (1 comment)