RENISHAW

Renishaw is one of the world's leading engineering and scientific technology companies, with expertise in precision measurement and healthcare. The company employs over 4,000 people worldwide and supplies products for use in applications as diverse as jet engine and wind turbine manufacture, through to 3D printing, dentistry and brain surgery.

Renishaw and Dassault Systèmes have collaborated to close the gap between CAD and metal additive manufacturing (AM). This collaboration has streamlined flow of data, removing the need for intermediary software packages and enabling verified AM build files to be produced from the native CAD environment.

Users of Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform applications can now design, optimise, simulate and set up AM builds directly for production on Renishaw's AM systems, which build 3D metal parts using laser powder bed fusion technology. Dedicated CATIA applications include a range of tools to develop and perform topological optimisation of parts. DELMIA is employed to generate the process from build set up to generation of the necessary laser paths (scan paths). Simulation of the entire AM build, including stress analysis and distortion prediction, is carried out in SIMULIA.

Both Renishaw and Dassault Systemes have software which is accessible to authorised third parties and this played a key role in the collaboration. It ensures the laser paths (scan paths) generated by DELMIA are optimised for Renishaw metal AM systems and produce the best quality builds.