Objective:
Learn more about the changes happening in nTop 5.10 regarding our new capabilities for rib design.
What is happening?
We are introducing new rib design capabilities in nTop 5.10. These new blocks and several existing blocks will be grouped in a new BETA Rib Design tab in the ribbon. This change is intended to help customers in two ways:
User Learning and Efficiency: The new tab allows us to group blocks needed to create rib patterns in a single tab, helping users quickly find the functions they need to build their workflows.
nTop Product Expansion: As a computation design tool, we want to enable our users to build geometry beyond lattices easily. These new blocks for designing ribs are the first step towards helping our customers to design more of their parts and more kinds of parts in nTop.
These new capabilities introduced in 5.10 include tools that allow users to project conformal patterns directly onto implicit geometry and then extrude the patterns into solid ribs. Simulation data and other spatially varying fields can be used to control rib orientation for manufacturability, thickness, draft angle, and rib-rib fillets. These new blocks can also be used in a workflow with nTop Automate to find the optimal rib layout.
See our nTop 5.10 Release Notes for detailed information on the new blocks.
Frequently Asked Questions:
1.0 Why Ribs?
Structural ribs are commonly used in weight-critical products, specifically in thin-walled components such as housings, panels, pressure vessels, manifolds, piping, and more. Structural requirements driving rib designs can come from product, system-level, or manufacturing loading, such as AM printing thermal loads (i.e., build distortion). Designing structural ribs in CAD is a manual and tedious process today. Due to the time it takes to design and iterate on these features, engineers often create suboptimal designs and waste valuable product development time trying to run through design iterations.
2.0 There are some rib design capabilities in nTop already; why are more being added?
It is possible to design some rib features in nTop today using conformal lattice workflows, but these tools were built for volumetric lattices and are not always ideal for ribs. These new blocks were explicitly created for rib design.
Back to top3.0 How do Ribs relate to Lattices?
On the back end, blocks for designing ribs utilize our core lattice technology where appropriate. However, for our users, rib design workflows are distinct from lattice workflows. While lattice designs typically start in 3D, rib designs often start as a line-based pattern and are extruded to 3D.
See the new Guide to Rib Design article for best practice workflow options and instructions on using existing latticing blocks.
4.0 Why are the capabilities in BETA?
We are releasing in BETA because we are introducing a new tab and new capabilities all at once. This update is the first of a series for modeling beyond lattices. We plan to release more modeling design and optimization capabilities soon.
See What are beta blocks? to learn more about how these work.