Castor has launched a new capability to automatically analyse 2D drawings, both technically and economically, and to provide recommendations on their suitability for 3D printing, allowing companies that base their manufacturing primarily on 2D drawings to quickly transition to additive manufacturing.
Castor says the new capability solves a problem many companies face, especially if they rely on 2D drawings that are decades old, making it difficult and time-consuming to determine which of their parts could be 3D printed.
“Castor is expanding its value proposition by offering many companies, which were not able to assess the compatibility of 3D printing to their organization until now, a feasible way to automatically analyse their design files and gain deep valuable data and knowledge regarding the potential of AM for them,” said Castor CEO Omer Blaier
“We give these organisations a tool that helps them find new business cases and discover opportunities to reach their initiatives and 3D printing goals, using their existing 2D design files.”
The software allows thousands of 2D drawings to be uploaded at once before automatically extracting product manufacturing information from the PDF files, calculating a part’s size, volume and complexity based on dimensions from projected views. The technology then suggests the 3D printability of parts, recommends optimal technology and materials, and performs a financial analysis of additive manufacturing compared to traditional manufacturing.
Results are exported and can be used to guide manufacturing processes, or to identify and further explore 3D CAD files.
Once the selected files are in a 3D format, Castor says that the software, which is available as a cloud or on-premise product, can also deliver recommendations for re-designing parts for additive manufacturing, such as part consolidation and weight reduction.
The advanced capabilities enable quick assessment of a part’s likelihood to failure, using what the company says is a unique, ‘tailored to AM’, Finite Elements Analysis.
