ModuleWorks 2024.08 Released

ModuleWorks announces the 2024.08 release of its software components for digital manufacturing. This latest release of the ModuleWorks SDK includes various new and enhanced features aimed at increasing safety, toolpath generation efficiency and part quality. These features contain enhancements across multiple components, ranging from multi-axis roughing to turning.

Multi-Axis Roughing—Area Roughing

With this new feature, ModuleWorks 2024.08 allows users to set a predefined rest stock thickness to detect the rest material. This eliminates all unnecessary passes in the rest roughing operation, generating cleaner toolpaths to reduce machining time and tool wear.

Multi-Axis Surface Finishing—Wall, Floor and Rest Finishing

The ModuleWorks 2024.08 release introduces a new floor parallel cut pattern for wall finishing that generates slices parallel to a planar floor. This ensures that features on the wall do not disrupt the pattern generation. The new pattern introduces a new set of geometries that can be machined with less tilting and better surface quality, the company reports.

Multi-Axis Surface Finishing—Wall, Floor and Rest Finishing

With this release, ModuleWorks introduces toolpath extensions. This feature allows the tool to extend its motion beyond the start and end points of each closed contour. This reduces the size of the cusps at the start and end points, particularly with advanced tools such as barrel tools, resulting in an even surface finish on walls, according to ModuleWorks.

3-Axis Machining

In the ModuleWorks 2024.08 release, the constant cusp strategy now supports spiral blend connections with a shift distance. This provides a better surface finish compared to the one-way cutting method with blend spline, direct, or follow surface links for areas where a single region collapses into multiple regions, ModuleWorks notes.

Turning

With this release, ModuleWorks has introduced a new B-axis profile turning strategy that allows users to create a turning toolpath with simultaneous tool axis tilting. This enables the tip to tilt around the tip center while gouge-checking the insert profile with respect to the part curve, creating a safe B-axis profile turning toolpath. The strategy supports both round and non-round inserts (triangle, square, parallelogram and diamond).

ModuleWorks 2024.08 is available for download from the ModuleWorks website.

For more details about these and the other new features and enhancements in the ModuleWorks 2024.08 release, see the ModuleWorks What’s New webpage: What’s New in ModuleWorks 2024.08.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.