Daily Planet Reports: Autodesk Sends Krypton into Orbit

This just in, from our trusted reporter Lois Lane. She's on the scene where a new kind of Krypton has been discovered!

But our Man of Steel, Superman, can rest easy. The Krypton Lane found poses no threat to him. It's a 22 MB plug-in, downloaded from Autodesk Labs. It might come to the rescue of some hardworking plastic part designers.

Krypton is ideal for plastic parts because it draws on Autodesk Moldflow's material database and technology. Once installed in Autodesk Inventor, Krypton appears as three buttons, or indicators for the manufacturability, cost estimate, and environmental impact of your design. The feedback is instantaneous. As you design, it keeps track of the changes in your volume, thickness, and features.

If you add features with undercuts, for example, Krypton warns you that you'll increase the manufacturing cost. When you choose one material over another, Krypton lets you know you may be increasing acquisition cost and environmental impact. It won't give you unit cost or provide quotes in $$, but it distinguishes materials as low, very low, and high cost groups. It also alerts you of materials that have high or low recyclable rates.

You might also learn quite a bit about the logistics of manufacturing plastic parts. Based on your design's geometry, Krypton might warn you, "high sheer stress is required to fill the part. If possible, add thickness to ease flow ..." or "your part includes a number of undercuts, which could make the part impossible to remove from the mold without increasing mold cost."

Krypton is currently available for Autodesk Inventor 2010 and 2011, Inventor LT 2010 and 2011, and SolidWorks 2010. If you're a SolidWorks user, you may be familiar with SolidWorks Sustainability Xpress, the environmental impact analysis function that comes free of charge with the software. (The full version, SolidWorks Sustainability, requires license purchase.)

"We're certainly not positioning [Krypton] as the equivalent of the sustainability tools from SolidWorks," said Bob Willaims, an Autodesk product marketing manager. "While Krypton does include a component that indicates environmental impact, this is not meant to be our sustainability offering. It's a design guide for plastic parts."

So citizens of Metropolis, go make your plastic parts cheaper, safer, and easier to manufacturer with Krypton.

For more, watch the video report below: