Altem Technologies is a 3D Innovation platform provider with expertise in Design, Simulation, Rapid Prototyping and Reverse Engineering. We have experienced Application Engineers for all our business verticals who help customers to solve their technical challenges. In the past two years we have taken various initiatives to connect the disciplines and provide our customers with end to end solutions to solve most (if not all) of their manufacturing and product design) problems.
Our Application Engineers continuously collaborate and understand the methods and practices of each discipline so that we are better enabled to propose and implement cross functional solutions at our customer end and we also actively participate in National and International level competitions to challenge and enhance our skills and collaboration.
During the Covid19 lockdown, our focus was to use the time and train ourselves even better to be well prepared to address our customers, in this regard our Software technical teams achieved ten certifications from Dassault Systèmes. This reminded me of an instance from June 2019 where GrabCAD which is the world’s largest design sharing community platform and the software arm of 3D Printing leader Stratasys introduced a design challenge based on product realism with 3D Printing. The GrabCAD global challenge was to print a full colour printable spaceship model which can be printed on Stratasys polyjet platform.
With Stratasys full colour, multi-material 3d printing technology – Polyjet a user can print 500,000 colour and material combinations in a single part, thus allowing to integrate CMF (colour, material and finish) in the prototyping stage itself which is an essential requirement for Industrial Designers.
This challenge excited both our Design and 3D printing application team, usually we are accustomed to design for functionality, but this challenge required us to design for visual appeal and aesthetics. So, we decided to take up the challenge and put on our thinking caps.
One of the most fascinating thing about polyjet is its ability to produce features trapped inside transparent shells (like a snow globe) this became the basis of our design concept. Growing up watching a lot of fiction and fantasy movies about invasion and aliens, we came up with the idea of Space Force One – A multipurpose high capacity mother ship that acts as a command centre of the supreme leader of the universe. The ship has been designed to carry multiple primary leaders as well as there as subordinates and can and land and take off and any conditions or terrain.
The ship is designed using Dassault Systemes 3D Experience Platform and for to be printed using the J750/J735 Series printers, the prime concept is created taking advantage that coloured parts can be trapped inside a Clear body and internal geometries can be visualized.
The interior contains two baby pods on either sides which can house multiple astronauts and can be temporarily detached from the Mother ship for Astronauts to carry out missions. The main ship has 2 levels, the bottom level which acts a rest area and top-level acts as a command centre.
The ships base is designed in a way that it is printed using soft (rubber like) material to visualise a soft vertical landing.
The challenge received 55 entries from across the world and was judged by Senior Industrial Design Managers from GrabCAD and Stratasys and we were thrilled to hear that after two elimination rounds, Altem received an honorary mention (5th position). Challenges like this encourage and motivate us to work outside of our day to day tasks and understand and improve on our strengths as a 3D Innovation Platform company.
