Advanced design automation for manufacturing and tooling | nTop

Tooling design

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

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Objectives of tooling design

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 production efficiency

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

Industry applications of tooling design

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*

Conformal cooling

With additive manufacturing, engineers can design better performing molds and dies with complex cooling channels or perforations that were previously impossible with traditional manufacturing. Cooling channels can help extend tooling life while reducing production cycle times.

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 key Tooling Design capabilities for additive manufacturing

Design automation

Encode your expertise in a block-based visual programming environment, and scale your design process with scripting.

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Perforations

Generate perforation patterns with thousands of elements on the surface of any part. Control the hole shape, size, spacing, and direction.

Advanced modeling

Perform reliable boolean and shelling operations. Create robust designs with smooth blends, fillets, rounds, and walls of variable thickness.

Build preparation

Create automated build preparation processes for additive manufacturing and ensure your designs are ready for production.

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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