Manufacturing and tooling

Save time, cut costs, and improve tooling performance with nTop’s advanced design automation capabilities for additive manufacturing (AM).

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What is manufacturing and tooling?

Today, smart factories and production lines are making use of 3D-printed jigs, fixtures, tooling, molds, and dies to increase throughput, improve worker productivity, and save costs. AM is also increasingly used in maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO). Design software with automation capabilities enables manufacturers to scale fully utilize their machine capacity, extend the life of equipment, and minimize the need for specialized personnel.

Objectives of manufacturing and tooling

Manufacturing and tooling with AM creates opportunities for engineers to increase throughput, reduce design time, and save costs.

Increase throughput

Maximizing throughput improves process efficiency, reduces costs, and can give companies an advantage over competitors.

Reduce manufacturing costs

3D printing is revealing new opportunities to reduce manufacturing costs with lightweighting and other advanced design strategies.

Minimize design time

A quicker design process enables engineers to improve efficiency and quality and bring parts to market faster.

Improve tooling efficiency

Companies are creating custom 3D-printed tooling that makes production and assembly faster and easier.

Applications of manufacturing and tooling

Additive manufacturing enables engineers to create advanced tooling across various applications.

Molds and dies

Additive manufacturing allows engineers to create more efficient parts, molds, and dies with new functionalities, like internal channels and conformal perforations. With AM, engineers can save time and money by rapidly iterating to optimize tool design and consolidating tooling assemblies.

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Lightweight 3D printed mold tool — *Source*

End effectors

With additive manufacturing, engineers can improve the efficiency of end effectors — the devices at the end of a robotic arm that interacts with the environment — by reducing size and mass.

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Jigs and fixtures

Additive manufacturing enables engineers to create custom jigs, fixtures, drill guides, masks, stilts, and setters to minimize manufacturing time and cost.

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nTop’s critical tools for manufacturing and tooling with additive manufacturing

Design automation

Set up reusable workflows that allow you to design jigs and fixtures in minutes.

Perforation patterns

Rapidly add perforation patterns to complex surfaces and easily control the spacing, size, geometry, and direction of the holes.

Cooling channels

Speed up, control, and fine-tune the design of conformal cooling channels using a field-driven approach.

AM build preparation

Auto-generate support structures, and slice and export machine data directly from an implicit body to bypass STL file size restrictions.

Creating 3D-printed robot grippers in just four days with topology optimization and reusable workflows

Preziosa Francesco and Add-it created custom 3D-printed metal robot grippers to bypass long CNC lead times. In the process, they created a topology-optimized fixture that enables lights-out manufacturing while reducing weight and saving cost.

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