Updated November 2022
In November of 2022, Stratasys announced the acquisition of Riven, the quality assurance software company. The cloud-based software solution will now be fully integrated into Stratasys’ GrabCAD® Additive Manufacturing Platform, benefiting customers using any Stratasys 3D printer running GrabCAD Print software. Learn more in the press release!
One of the worst things that can happen when printing an end-use production part is releasing at the end of the process that critical dimensions of the part don’t meet your intended design or your customer’s tight tolerance specifications.
Not only is the time spent printing and processing the part wasted along with the material used, engineers and technicians also need to spend multiple iterations adjusting the design and production parameters to meet spec. Most importantly, your company risks losing precious customer trust and revenue by missing critical ship dates or failing product inspection. This is an industry-wide problem for service bureaus and OEM’s across high-precision end-use industrial and consumer parts.
What if there was another way?
Riven is a cloud software company specializing in 3D reality intelligence that accelerates product introduction of high-accuracy, end-use additive manufactured parts. Riven’s software, using 3D reality data and proprietary algorithms, allows engineering and manufacturing teams to cut iterations and time to good parts while improving the customer experience.
Now, with Riven as a Stratasys solution, OEMs and service bureaus have access to 3D Reality Intelligence. As a result, customers can optimize their new product introduction and manufacturing processes so their product can reach the market quicker than ever.
Optimization and Automation with Riven
Riven was founded with the vision of “making data from real parts as easy to use as CAD and completing the digital manufacturing thread” according to James Page - Founder and CTO of Riven.
Riven, in essence, works by taking 3D data (CAD and real-part Scans), automatically diagnosing deviations between real parts and a reference model (i.e. CAD or golden part) and allowing distributed teams across the supply chain to collaborate using rich 3D visualization to quickly see and resolve product introduction problems.
“There are always discrepancies between CAD and the real additive manufactured part. CAD is meant to be perfect and under ideal situations whereas a real part can deviate due to systematic printer issues. Riven’s software shows those differences using graphical 3D information such as heatmaps. This helps inform decisions across distributed teams on what to do next from the manufacturing side.” explains James.
Now, Riven has gone further and corrects these deviations by introducing Warp-Adapted-Models (WAM); Riven’s WAM corrects systematic warp, scaling and offset from all causes in minutes from a first printed part.
In the above a example of an FDM 9085 bracket, if your customer required 90% of all points be within a global tolerance of +/- 250 m, the original 9085 bracket printed from CAD would have failed by being out of spec (only 72% of points fall within tolerance), but the corrected one would have passed (93% of its points are in tolerance). The red data indicates where the part is out of tolerance.
Additive manufactured parts using Riven WAM are up to 10X more accurate than those printed with CAD. WAM is also scalable from singular high-value parts to series production. This improved accuracy helps solve the customer pain and problems from out-of-spec parts and enables exciting new end-use product applications for AM.
Riven is also developing a predictive version of WAM that uses machine learning without requiring the printing of a first part. This has tremendous implications for even greater economies of scale and minimising wasted production cycles.
Moving forward
Riven is focused on working with advanced customers now and building the list of compatible printers/materials. Warp-Adapted-Models and data used for manufactured part insights will also advance with the growing focus and influence of 3D reality on the additive manufacturing industry.
As James explains, “Riven’s objective is to accelerate the entire Additive Manufacturing industry by enabling systematic ramp-up of end-use production parts. We’re thrilled Riven joined Stratasys to deliver compelling joint solutions based on open platforms.”
