nTop and ORNL Collaborating to Develop Innovative Toolkits

This week nTop announced a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) through a two year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) which covers two phases of development funded by the Department of Energy.

The goal of the collaboration is to capture ORNL’s experience and expertise in advanced manufacturing processes to create toolkits in nTop Platform that will allow them to design and manufacture parts with unprecedented control and material properties. These toolkits will then be made available not only to ORNL and its partners but also to users of nTop Platform.

The first phase will include the development of an nTop toolkit to optimize design and print parameters for the Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM™) machine via direct connectivity to ORNL slicer to fabricate parts on the BAAM systems.

BAAM system. Image courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory/US Department of Energy

Phase two will include the creation of a toolkit to use nTop Platform’s capability to volumetrically engineer direct metal grain growth with an Arcam electron beam manufacturing (EBM) system.

Additionally nTop will develop an nTop toolkit to design simulation driven honeycomb infill for fused deposition modeling (FDM) type systems. And finally, nTop will collaborate on the optimization of support structures for direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) and EBM based on ORNL’s years of experience with multiple systems.

ORNL have been doing groundbreaking research and development in the advanced manufacturing space that has led the way for the broader industry. nTop is able to assist them by providing software tools to help them advance their research even further, and make those very same tools available to nTop Platform users.

Michael Borish, ORNL’s lead researcher, commented, “As a leader in advanced manufacturing, ORNL works with industry to help them bring new technologies, such as the nTopology software toolkit, to the marketplace.”

Source: nTopology