TriMech Blog

These days more and more consumer products are made with the ability to connect to the internet. Some common home appliances that you’ve always used, might now be able to connect to other devices. Refrigerators, microwaves, doors, coffee makers, lights – all these items are part of a category called IoT or the Internet of things.

Stratasys printers offer a wide range of material options across their FDM product line. These materials are all true thermoplastics that are common to many traditional forms of fabrication (i.e. ABS, PC, Nylon, Ultem). The majority of FDM printed parts are used for prototyping, jig, fixtures, tooling and end-use applications. In these settings, it's common for the 3D printed parts to come in contact with various chemicals. This means when deciding which material is the best fit for an application it's important to not just look at the strength of a particular material (tensile strength, impact-resistance, elongation at break, etc.), but we must also look at how a material can hold up to potential chemical exposure.

TriMech is fortunate to work with clients from Maine to Florida and out to Arkansas, offering a range of engineering solutions. This week's client story showcases a global packaging solutions provider and their use of Stratasys FDM technology. 

3D printing is progressively changing the way products are designed, prototyped and you guessed it - packaged! For example, one of our longtime clients is a global packaging solutions provider who produces packaging products for virtually every industry. Their corporate office uses Stratasys 3D printing equipment to advance their development and testing of thermoformed packaging products.

When visiting our clients, we have noticed a trend. Some teams decide not to upgrade their SOLIDWORKS with yearly updates or service packs. Many of our clients have chosen to stay around SOLIDWORKS 2016 for many reasons, but mainly due to the comfort zone formed after prolonged use. But as we move into SOLIDWORKS 2019, there are simply too many optimizations and improvements to ignore! This new edition of SOLIDWORKS focuses on the entire ecosystem of taking a design from a preliminary idea to a final product by putting a spotlight on quality and assembly performance, along with a ton of other tool developments we would love to see you take advantage of. This post will briefly discuss some of our favorite improvements.

3D scanning is an increasingly popular technology and is mostly used for reverse engineering and quality assurance. Reverse engineering is commonly known as backward engineering because it's the process through which information is extracted from pre-existing objects to reproduce them based on the information gathered.

As children, we were fascinated with Play-Doh. Excited by the idea of turning a simple cylinder block of soft dough into a monster, pizza, village or whatever else our minds could come up with! Lucky for us, we don’t have to completely grow out of this thanks to 3D printing. And with Desktop Metal 3D printers our designs and ideas are much more permanent. Read on to discover what metal 3D printing is bringing to the table.

Engineers often need to answer questions regarding heat transfer in their designs. As with many other things, the specific task or question being asked will determine what tool to use to get the best result. Here we look at answering the question of when to use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) vs. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in heat transfer problems.

For the past several decades, manufacturing has been thought of as a “dirty” job reserved for countries with a cheap labor market. However, we’ve found that physically separating manufacturing and consumption of goods increases cost. A new era of manufacturing is beginning, and it starts with domestic and regionalized manufacturing that utilizes new and exciting technologies in well-manicured workspaces.

FDM Nylon 12C is a chopped carbon fiber-filled polyamide 12 material that is available for 3D printing on compatible Stratasys Fortus production systems. The material is 35% carbon-fiber by weight and has a high strength-to-weight ratio with a tensile strength on par with high-performance FDM material.
 

This week's Product Story showcases  Built-Rite Tool & Die and their use of Desktop Metal Solutions.

Built-Rite Tool & Die is a mold-making and design firm in Massachusetts with expertise in precision mold manufacturing. They specialize in the production of molds for plastic injection molding.