Many new companies evolve during their infancy in stealth mode, emerging into the light when their product and/or service offering is demonstrably strong enough to impact its target market and withstand close scrutiny from potential customers and, of course, any press interest. This is the stage that UK company Additive Flow has reached. 

Established in 2017, Additive Flow has developed advanced and unique digital solutions to solve many of the existing challenges within the additive manufacturing (AM) workflow. 

The Additive Flow team comprises strong advocates for the performance potential of industrial 3D printing and AM as well as its potential to facilitate more sustainable manufacturing practices. However, the “potential” of AM has been discussed for many years now, while the realization of this potential has been slow to follow. One of the key barriers to adoption of the technology set occurs at the front end — throughout the digital workflow that AM necessitates, which encompasses design for AM, design optimization with multiple parameters, process simulation, process parameter optimization and material selection and placement. 

Additive Flow has developed its modular FormFlow software to address many of these challenges — faced by many designers and engineers working with (or engaging for the first time with) 3D printing and additive manufacturing processes for product development and production applications. FormFlow is multi-functional software with the capability to apply multiple user-defined parameters for simultaneous geometry, process parameter and material optimisation. The dedicated, physics-driven algorithms within FormFlow do all of the complex work, and produce comprehensive and tangible results that deliver optimally performing parts cost effectively, sustainably and rapidly. 

Put simply, FormFlow:

• puts the right material, with the right properties, in the right place
• optimises part geometry and material properties simultaneously with multi-physics algorithms
• subsequently allows users to simultaneously view productivity, cost, and performance outcomes of different design/production recommendations
• allows for multiple materials and different geometry optimisations 
• quickly and efficiently produces optimised production files according to multiple user-defined parameters. 

FormFlow is also AM-process / system agnostic with specialist solvers that account for the unique properties in AM materials and can be tailored to work with single- and/or multi-material designs. 

Additive Flow is currently working on a project consultancy basis with a range of companies from OEMs to SMEs as well as AM ecosystem companies. This is because Additive Flow’s digital solutions are versatile and modular, and can be used right across customised workflows with all of its multi-functionality, or it can be applied specifically to unlock particular bottlenecks in any given workflow to optimize cost, performance and sustainability outcomes. The company will open up FormFlow on license later this year.