Ansys Discovery’s new burst-to-cloud service leverages the power of the Ansys Cloud’s Nvidia A10G GPUs with 24 GB GPU memory, leading to eye- opening acceleration of parametric studies conducted in Discovery.

To use this service, users with a parametric study in Discovery simply select ‘solve on cloud’. It supports all Discovery Explore physics, including thermal, structural and fluids. Users pay with Ansys Credits and are charged on the basis of computation time.

Simulation set-ups run in parallel on the service, without the need to deploy or select virtual machines or job managers. As design variations are simulated, results are streamed back to the Discovery interface, populating charts and tables for further evaluation and comparison.

You simply can’t miss this beast of a desktop workstation. UK firm Armari has managed to squeeze even more performance out of the already insanely powerful AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series processor.

In fact, equipped with the 64-core Threadripper 7980X, this machine can outpace Dell, HP, or Lenovo offerings armed with the pricier 96-core Threadripper Pro7995WX, especially when it comes to demanding tasks like ray tracing or computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.

Of course, there’s a catch here: more power consumption and more heat. But the good news is that the user can easily tweak the settings in order to find the right balance – or confine themselves to going full throttle only when deadlines loom.

With Alias 2025 more capable than any previous release, Autodesk has introduced the Custom Puck as a new way for users to access their most frequently used tools, editors, menu items and navigation controls.

The puck is fully customisable, so new users can add and organise tools as they learn. For casual users, work becomes more intuitive. Expert users, meanwhile, can add high use or special settings at a click.

Whatever your level, a key function reduces the amount of mouse travel, speeding up workflows – especially for viz teams that love large monitors. The Custom Puck is made up of a centre, an inner ring, and one or more outer rings, so the number of tools made available is entirely at the user’s discretion.

For maximum density, 3D-printed parts – mostly built with Lithoz’s ceramic additive manufacturing technology – undergo several thermal steps to remove binder content and for sintering.

From there, Bosch offers further processing using methods that include hard machining, laser processing and functional coating. Whether you have ideas for a new ceramic component, or want to fill a gap in manufacturing, having Bosch on call is an expert choice.

bosch-advanced-ceramics.com

CADchat is a digital workspace that combines video meetings, design reviews and centralised communication for teams and external stakeholders.

Its charm is its simplicity, with a user interface that’s easy to navigate Instant messaging and face-to-face calls enable users to share native CAD models with colleagues, with everyone able to work on a model, mark it up and see exactly what their fellow team members are seeing.

Clever hosting technology means no time lags and using native CAD data means no messing around with PDFs, even for 2D DXF markups. CADchat is SOC 2 compliant, with all customer data including CAD files encrypted with AES-256 when at rest and with TLS when in transit.

Cadify is one of a number of start-ups tackling generative AI for solid modelling. The approach it has chosen is an AI assistant that intelligently guides next steps, reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and streamlines design iterations.

Rather than taking humans out of the design process, Cadify monitors all design stages and makes useful suggestions. You increase a part length; the assistant suggests that you might want to increase the diameter by a percentage. If you choose that option, the system makes the changes.

Cadify has been built to be intuitive rather than intrusive. A beta plug-in for Autodesk Fusion was launched earlier this year, with more in the pipeline for later in 2024.

3D printing elastomers is nothing new, but Chromatic 3D is offering a range of polyurethanes for builds that are as close to injection moulded parts as we’ve ever seen.

The shore hardness ratings of these polyurethanes ranges from 50 to 90, for tough parts that can be flexed, stretched, twisted and repeatedly squeezed.

Custom seals, grommets and bladders can be quickly built on demand, but Chromatic is taking its 3D printing abilities to another level by printing directly onto other materials – including metal, glass, ceramic and even garment fabrics – without need for adhesives or fasteners.

Chromatic knows its market well. Manufacturers of products such as O-rings might normally bypass slow 3D printing, but with the RX-Flow’s ability to custom 3D-print billets to size, they have a real opportunity here to work faster and with less waste.

c3dmaterials.com

If you’re in need of some serious power for rendering, simulation or AI, the Comino Grando is in a league of its own. This machine is whisper-quiet, thanks to Comino’s custom liquid cooling technology, which goes beyond just the CPU to also cool GPUs and VRMs.

But the Grando isn’t just quiet. It’s blazing fast, too. Comino claims it can push the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7985WX (64 cores) to a whopping 5.0 GHz on all cores, easily outpacing air-cooled systems.

Need more GPU muscle? You can load it with up to four top-tier GPUs such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 or HPC/ AI-focused Nvidia A100 and H100, all thanks to a sleek copper water block that frees up PCIe slots.

grando.ai

Mate Helper recognises components in an assembly and suggests locations where they might be added to the product. Smart Mate creates fully constrained mates, by dragging and holding components in the position where you want them to mate with surrounding components. Selection Helper aims to be one step ahead of the user, predicting and suggesting which element of the model they’ll select next.

Solidworks is clearly working hard to balance a smooth design experience with control for the user, and so far it looks promising.

solidworks.com

Formlabs’ Form 4 is all about speed, promising builds two to five times faster than the Form 3+. This new, resin-based 3D printer features

the Low Force Display Print Engine, capable of maximum vertical print speeds of 100mm per hour across a full-size (200 × 125 × 210mm) build, completing it in two hours.

But print speed is only part of the story, because everything is faster, including part washing and cure times. And there’s no compromise on print quality, with 50-micron pixels achievable, thanks to advanced pixel smoothing and highly collimated light technology.

When you factor in automation features, then this is the 3D printer setting the pace for design studios and workshop machines.

Generative design isn’t just for parts. It’s equally applicable to full, complex systems and in situations where thousands of designs need to be generated and tested in parallel.

That’s the view of the founding team at Generative Engineering, whose background experiences include a doctorate in computational engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and product management roles at Google. What they have in common is first-hand experience of the complexities of general engineering gained at British electric vehicle company Arrival.

Generative Engineering’s code-first integration framework allows engineers to plug in existing software products and use them alongside out- of-the-box integrations.

generative.vision