Digitally Manufacturable Design Optimization

Transforming Product Design using AI-Assisted Partnership and Advanced Manufacturing

• Automatically generate multiple design options
• Include manufacturing capabilities early in the design process
• Model complex structures
• Optimize designs
• Minimize time to market
• Improve overall product quality

Product design in the 21st century uses software conceived for 20th century manufacturing. Manufacturing and materials technologies have progressed beyond the ability of design software to truly take advantage of them. The vast design freedom provided by new materials and manufacturing is in tension with the ability to search vast design spaces to synthesize innovative products.

FIELDS software improves product design by giving designers the tools to rapidly conceive highly effective designs that simultaneously meet performance, materials, and fabrication requirements.
It enables designers to plan, simulate and visualize the output of the manufacturing process, facilitating easier inspection and redesign. We have demonstrated the power and flexibility of FIELDS on a variety of customer use cases and DARPA challenge problems.

We invite collaboration! Contact us to evaluate FIELDS and discuss new technology-driven solutions to manufacturing challenges.

Applications:

• Aerospace
• Defense
• Automotive
• Energy production
• Manufacturing tooling
• Medical devices
• Consumer products

Model and Assess Manufacturing Options to Find the Best Solution
FIELDS automatically searches high-dimensional spaces of shape, material, and process alternatives to generate optimal solutions to a set of design specifications and manufacturing constraints, using multi-fidelity, multi-material, multi-physics-based engineering analysis and optimization. FIELDS includes novel geometric reasoning techniques to automatically plan, simulate and visualize the output of the manufacturing process as a model which can be inspected virtually and redesigned.

In Depth Views, From Synthesis to Fabrication
FIELDS maintains four in-depth views of an artifact (as-designed, as-planned, as-manufactured, as-analyzed) as it passes through the computational workflow from synthesis to fabrication. At each view, the structure of the physical artifact will be modeled by representing shape, topology, and heterogeneous, anisotropic material structure at six size scales. Complex structures such as human bones reconstructed from CT data, or very fine multi-material aperiodic lattice structures are easily modeled using this novel approach.

FIELDS will automatically provide manufacturability and performance feedback for synthesized designs and compile design requirements into a valid design with fabrication instructions.

Solving the Difficult Challenges: Additive Manufacturing, Combined Materials, Complex Shapes
The FIELDS framework is flexible and has been adapted to a variety of challenging problems such as planning for combined additive manufacturing and machining, design optimization with multiple materials and manufacturing constraints, interactive visualization of highly detailed shapes such as ‘as-manufactured’ models based on custom additive manufacturing specifications, and other capabilities beyond state-of-the art design software.

FIELDS is especially well suited to take advantage of additive manufacturing. Using additive manufacturing to produce complex shapes that are otherwise hard to fabricate has led to the misconception that any 3D model can be identically 3D printed. Analyzing manufacturability in terms of printable geometry allows designers to make informed tradeoffs between design complexity and manufacturing capability. For example, FIELDS can identify material that needs be added at locations where designs are not printable in such a way that they can be machined as a post-processing step. In turn, this alleviates the burden on the designer to integrate computational and practical expertise from diverse disciplines, which is a significant bottleneck in today’s product lifecycle management systems.

All of this can be translated to various industries and manufacturing processes, drawing on PARC’s diverse range of expertise and capabilities to revolutionize numerous industries.

Significant enhancements in product performance and a shortened time-to-market are a few of the immediate benefits of the FIELDS technology and process.