Last year, for the very first time, automated depowdering expert Solukon, together with The Exploration Company, opened our eyes to the importance of designing for depowdering: how to optimize 3D printed parts from the start. At the heart of that idea sat SPR-Pathfinder®, the intelligence behind Solukon’s automated depowdering systems, which identifies “undepowderable” geometries before a part is ever printed.
Little did we know that, even as we discussed it, Solukon was already building a more capable version of its software. Today, the company introduces SPR-Pathfinder® Pro, a version that deepens this “design-stage” feature.
“The Pro version has been a long-time project in development. We initially concentrated on developing custom pathfinder versions for customers but then later started developing a new product altogether when similar demands from different customers started arising. The main deciding factor for us to change our strategy was the problem customers were facing with restricted abilities of pathfinder standard to deal with large number of voxels,” SPR-Pathfinder® Product Owner Hemank Raj told 3D ADEPT Media.
What were these challenges? We asked.
And Raj points out 3 of them:
- The fact that certain LPBF parts have exceeded all existent complexity limits and therefore the ceiling of the standard SPR-Pathfinder® version: Ensuring automated depowdering accuracy can be hard to guarantee for geometries like ultra-compact thermal management components, multi-channel aerospace structures.
“Our customers are now using SPR-Pathfinder® Pro to depowder extremely complex parts with internal channels smaller than 0.5mm in diameter resulting to number of voxels created crossing 40 billion marks, this possessed altogether a different problem which the earlier version of pathfinder was never designed to deal with”, Raj told us.
- The need for full process transparency: If you can’t clearly trace what happened inside the part, it becomes hard to explain deviations, prove repeatability, or meet customer and certification expectations. Much can already be achieved with the Digital Factory Tool, SPR-Pathfinder® Pro goes further.
- And the willingness to enhance the “Design for Depowdering” process. We’ve spent years preaching the benefits of DfAM (Design for Additive Manufacturing). What if we apply the same thinking to what happens after printing? For Solukon, designing for depowdering implies considering, from the earliest design stage, whether powder can reliably escape the part’s internal structures and adjusting the geometry accordingly before a single layer is printed. The payoff is practical: fewer iterations and surprises after printing, more predictable lead times, and a clearer route to repeatable, documentable post-processing, the company says.
“SPR-Pathfinder Pro (in contrast to the actual standard version) has no voxel limit for calculation. A very high number of voxels (more than 1,000,000,000) is required for very complex parts with a lot of winded channels and openings,” Raj explains.
This response from Raj highlights one of the key capabilities of the Pro version: higher simulation (with the ability to support up to 1,000,000 particles, a 20-fold increase over the standard version).
The two other main capabilities include cross-sectional inspection in all planes and an accurate process-time prediction.
So, what would happen to a manufacturer today who tried to use the standard version on the parts Pro is designed for?
And Raj answers: “As there are multiple limitations with the standard version of the pathfinder software, depending upon the part and the configuration selected by the user the current pathfinder software might not be able to process the file at all and throw an error.”
SPR-Pathfinder® PRO extends the digital twin through the full post-processing workflow, from design validation to production planning, delivering the process transparency that industrial AM operations increasingly need to scale with confidence. A depowdering system is only as intelligent as the software running it. That has always been Solukon’s starting point and SPR-Pathfinder® PRO testifies to that.
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