Design software from the US-based company nTop (formerly called nTopology) is an enigma for those less familiar with additive manufacturing design. It’s like traditional CAD (computer-aided design) software, but it’s uniquely tuned to create parts and products destined to be manufactured with 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing).
It’s been called the founding software of the Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) movement, and engineers use it to design (or redesign) parts to be lighter weight and more efficient than parts made by traditional manufacturing.
For example, Aerojet Rocketdyne has used nTop it to optimize a component of their spacecraft for additive manufacturing, which turned out to be 67% lighter and 66% less expensive than if it were to be conventionally manufactured. Bauer Hockey used it to develop helmet padding that absorbs more impact than foam. Medical device company SI-Bone used it to develop surgical screws featuring lattice structures that promote bone growth, which is impossible with conventionally manufactured surgical screws.
Designing a part for 3D printing is unlike designing for any other manufacturing method. Additive manufacturing technologies offer enormous design freedom compared to injection molding or CNC machining, and, as nTop will tell you, it takes unique software tools.
In May 2023, nTop launched a series of new capabilities to its proprietary software platform, which was launched in 2015 to “upend the constraints of traditional CAD software,” the company says. The new features in nTop 4, which we cover in more detail below, are designed to help users corral all of the platform’s tools, features, and data into a more manageable, repeatable, and automated design workflow.
nTop features design tools for creating
- Lattice structures
- Topology optimized parts
- Designs that meet specific objectives and constraints
- Hollow structures
- Internal lattice designs
- Parts consolidated into one
- Lightweight parts
- Structural, thermal, and lattice simulations
- Multiple versions based on perimeters
- + more
Let’s take a look at nTop 4’s main features, including lattice generation, generative design, topology optimization, and simulation.
Lattice Generation
Lattices are one of the hallmarks of additive manufacturing since they – with a few exceptions – can’t be manufactured any other way. Filling an otherwise solid part with a lattice reduces weight and materials as we’ve already discussed, and it’s leading to the creation of some groundbreaking heat exchangers and rocket thrusters, to name just two applications.
Lattices are, at their core, mathematical calculations, so your software is key. Although you can create lattice structures in some CAD software and a growing number of specialty programs, nTop offers a deep variety of lattice options and features that make it faster. In fact, in most CAD programs, it’s not easy to quickly and efficiently create complex lattice structures.
nTop is built upon an implicit modeling engine. In implicit modeling, 3D geometry is defined as a mathematical function, not as external surfaces and edges. This feature allows engineers to quickly generate complex structures – like lattices – while providing the reliability needed to feed automated design loops.
nTop features what the company calls GPU acceleration to make real-time visualization of lattice structures fast. The software enables you to preview design changes and rebuild even highly complex lattices in seconds. You can also adjust the lattice perimeters at every point in space and save your preferences in a reusable workflow.
If you’re new to lattices, nTop comes with an intro to lattices course, and the folks at nTop have posted a bevy of videos.
Generative Design
nTop defines generative design a little differently than other software companies. According to nTop, there are three core components to generative design: geometry generation, design optimization based on constraints and requirements, and automated design loops.
nTop enables you to create your own generative algorithms based on your part’s specific requirements. The company aims to give you tools with the necessary level of control so that you can iterate faster and more efficiently. No, it doesn’t spit out dozens of options to choose from, but nTop integrates with scripting tools that do.
nTop allows engineers to superimpose fields to create optimized structures in a design methodology the company calls Field-Driven Design.
Finally, the software’s design automation capabilities enable engineers to build reusable processes that rerun automatically when the input variables change. This way, you can iterate rapidly, automatically generate multiple design candidates, and evaluate them against your engineering requirements.
Although not the standard approach to generative design, nTopology’s software will deliver a part or product optimized to your unique requirements.
Topology Optimization
It’s clear by now that nTop is not just about topology optimization, but it is a feature where this product shines.
You may already know that topology optimization applies simulation-driven techniques to minimize material usage. Removing material from areas that do not carry significant loads generates a part that meets design objectives (like weight reduction) while fulfilling design requirements, such as available materials or manufacturing constraints.
Fueled only by what part has to achieve, the algorithms involved in topology optimization can spit out some insane-looking shapes that are not manufacturable except by 3D printing. Today, topology optimization is mainly applied in aerospace and automotive applications to reduce the weight and improve the performance of spacecraft and race cars, but you’ll also see it in the medical, industrial, and consumer product sectors as well as architecture and art.
The topology optimization tools in nTop give you detailed control of the process. You to optimize for single or multiple design objectives, including structural compliance to specified loads, volume fraction, stress, displacement, mass properties, and resonant frequency. The available geometric constraints include planar symmetry, extrusion, overhang, and pattern repetition. You can define materials with custom properties or select from a list of presets.
To verify your topology optimization results, nTop has built-in simulation capabilities, and you can also export simulation meshes for FEA or CFD analysis in external simulation tools. You can also export your STEP or Parasolid file format parts to your favorite CAD program.
Simulation
No engineering design software today is complete without simulation. Although it’s not a replacement for physical testing, a simulation environment saves a tremendous amount of time when used throughout the design process. If powerful enough, it can speed up iterations and keep you from taking your design down the wrong path.
Rather than relying on simulation at the end of the design process, nTop integrates it into its many features so the results of simulations directly drive part geometry.
nTop has built-in finite element analysis (FEA) software tools, including volume and weight optimization, heat transfer analysis, stress and strain calculations simulation. For example, simulation results can be used to locally thicken a lattice structure or increase the thickness of shelling operation in areas with higher stresses.
Looking forward, nTop hopes to add simulations for thermomechanics, fluid flow, acoustics, and electromagnetics.
Currently, there are no computational fluid dynamics tools, but you can import models into nTop from other simulation software. In fact, you can also export full part models (including geometry, materials, and boundary conditions) to file formats supported by all major external simulation tools and design optimization software. nTop currently supports the import of structural analysis and thermal analysis results in the native formats of ANSYS Mechanical, Nastran, Patran, and others, and supports engineering data from sources, such as CAD software, meshing software, and tabulated data.
Interoperability & Integrations
Let’s say you only occasionally design for additive manufacturing and already have a suite of CAD, simulation, and other tools. How will nTop play with your existing stack? Pretty well as it turns out. nTop features a wide range of application interoperability that enables you to design in your favorite CAD and then optimize for AM in nTop. Alternatively, you may want to put your model through some generative engineering steps in nTop then simulate in another tool and then back to nTop and send it directly to your 3D printer slicer software, even though nTop has build prep features, including part orientation and support structure generation.
In the latest update, nTop introduces more opportunities to integrate with other platforms called Implicit Interop, which lets you export your nTop optimized designs in megabytes, not gigabytes.
“Implicit Interop is a new data transfer technology specifically built to address the challenges created by additive manufacturing. Implicit Interop allows you to transfer design data between nTop, manufacturing, CAD, and CAE software using the nTop Implicit File (.implicit) file format,” the company announced. With this new file format, you’ll be able to directly import nTop Implicit Files into manufacturing, design, and simulation software using native connections and plug-ins.
nTop 4 – What's New
With nTop 4, the company says it is hoping to bring additive manufacturing to mainstream production. The new release introduces new capabilities on top of the four core capabilities covered above.
Spanning design, integration, scaling, and adoption, nTop 4 now enables engineers to automate and streamline some complex engineering product development processes.
The Field Optimization technology is a complex engineering development process that nTop says will help engineers navigate the overwhelming number of design parameters that complex engineering problems can have. Field Optimization layers a multi-scale and multi-objective optimization engine on top of nTop’s core generative design technology, which results in an easy-to-use workflow to generate optimized lattice structures.
The new Implicit Interop will make file transfer faster and easier, nTop says, with tools developers can use to integrate with nTop and a brand new file format (.implicit) used to directly exchange implicit geometry without meshing, resulting in smaller file sizes at lossless precision.
The nTop Automate enables engineers to boost resources by executing nTop workflows through a programmatic environment. In addition to the Windows deployment, nTop 4 introduced nTop Automate for Linux.
Also new to nTop 4 is nTop Accelerate, a range of one-to-one training services, custom workshops, and design sprints to help enterprise customers meet a specific program objective. This consulting is on top of nTop’s onboarding programs – like nTop Learn and nTop’s online learning center.
Alternatives to nTop
If you’re not in a position to afford nTop’s enterprise-level price tag, which is on par with high-end engineering software like Ansys, Creo, and CATIA, what are the alternatives? Well, there are less expensive ways to achieve less robust versions of the features and very focused solutions that could stand in for parts of nTop. For example, if your main interest is in latticing, there are stand-alone solutions, such as Gen3D Sulis or General Lattice. Likewise, for simulation, there are various solutions, but none of which would be considered economical.
To get your feet wet with the kinds of features you find in nTop 4, consider these alternatives below.
Fusion 360
Fusion 360 from Autodesk, apart from being a CAD program, offers a growing list of Design for Additive Manufacturing features. Autodesk’s generative design technology – offered as an optional extension to the Fusion 360 – enables rapid design exploration by simultaneously generating multiple solutions based on manufacturing constraints, cost, and product performance requirements. In 2022 Autodesk released a preview of a new generative design tool in Fusion 360 that lets you explore alternative designs earlier in your workflow. The new Automated Modeling tool lets you rapidly create and consider multiple design alternatives for connecting two or more faces in your design.
Inside Fusion 360, you’ll also find a topology optimization module that enables you to explore design options to reduce weight, improve performance, and consolidate parts. There’s also a simulation environment where you can expose your design to static and thermal stresses, structural buckling, and event simulation-like dropping.
To take your topology optimization a step further, there’s the Fusion 360 with the Netfabb Premium or Netfabb Ultimate optional modules, which feature more advanced tools for generative design, simulation, and integration with Autodesk Nastran FEA solver, which is a finite element analysis tool used to analyze linear and nonlinear stress, dynamics, and heat transfer characteristics of structures and mechanical components.
Creo
Creo CAD software from PTC also has a generative design module to explore numerous innovative design options simultaneously and is fully integrated into a simulation environment. Creo’s relatively new Generative Topology Optimization (GTO) extension and cloud-based Generative Design Extension (GDX) help you optimize product designs based on your constraints and requirements – including materials and manufacturing processes.
Not just a modeling tool; it also takes a step further into simulation-driven design through Ansys Powered Simulation in Creo. The process enables analyses in real-time for structural, modal, thermal, and fluid flows.
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