DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

A couple of weeks ago, Autodesk launched its latest labs experiment for the Inventor community, entitled Project Krypton with the goal of giving “Get real-time feedback on a plastic part design’s manufacturability, cost efficiency, and environmental impact.” What this appears to boil down to is the collection of a number of technologies from the Moldflow acquisition and the beginning of integrating some of the more esoteric features and functions from that product stack (those which perhaps lie outside of the immediately obvious use of Moldflow) and applying them in new and novel ways. The name gives away another of the interesting points, with as all us comic book geeks know, Kryptonite is the chink in Superman’s armour - the link being that the set of tools are available for both Inventor and SolidWorks. I took a while to play with the tool and had a quick chat with the development team behind the product, so here my thoughts.

Once you’ve got it downloaded and installed (it works with the 2010 releases of both Inventor and SolidWorks) and start a new part, you’ll notice three small dials to the bottom left of your screen. From left to right, these represent Manufacturability, Cost Efficiency and Environment Impact of the Material. As you start to design a plastic part, you’ll notice that these dials update in real time to give you an indication of how the part is performing against a number of checks within each category. As you build the part, the dials change (they all too briefly also display a vector for improvement or deterioration of the results. Should the tool find serious problems, it’ll flag up with a warning triangle and give you more information. Let’s explore what each does.

For manufacturability:

Basically, this is running a draft angle and under cut analysis on the part. With each rebuild of the part, the system is performing an analysis of the part, finding the most appropriate direction of pull and basing the calculations of the basis of that. As soon as you build in something that matches these features, it’ll flag and give you a list of the errors. As you can see below, the system also includes a visualisation option, so the model greys back and the undercuts or non-drafted faces are presented in red.

Krypton tools inside Inventor, giving manufacturability feedback in terms of undercuts - faces shown in red

Krypton tools inside SolidWorks this time, giving manufacturability feedback in terms of faces without Draft shown in red

Cost efficiency:

This looks at a couple of things - namely, the size of the part (with the system working on the principles of a small, medium and large moulding machine - bigger machine, more cost) and the complexity of the part - will the tooling (remember, this is for plastic part design only) required complex features, such as slides, lifters and other actions to create the geometry you’ve designed. Add more complex features, the cost efficiency dial winds up.

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