RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC, September 2-The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Geomagic, provider of digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP), a Phase IIB grant to extend research into technologies that will have a profound impact on product design and development.

The latest grant comes on the heels of successful Phase I and Phase II projects aimed at giving designers the ability to easily create accurate digital representations of scanned physical parts.

Work on the Phase IIB grant has major implications in mechanical design applications. It addresses customer needs for automation, computational efficiency and high-quality surfacing. The research will further extend the core technology found in Geomagic’s recently introduced Fashion module, which captures the original design intent of a scanned physical object and transforms it into a computer-aided design (CAD) ready surface model.

“These technologies are tearing down the walls between physical parts and their digital representations, speeding iterations of design, engineering, manufacturing and maintenance throughout the product life cycle,” says Dr. Michael Facello, principal investigator for Geomagic’s research. “The new software algorithms we are developing have the potential to reduce design cycles from months to days, improve quality through better analysis, shorten maintenance and repair cycles, dramatically reduce waste and enable product customization on a mass scale.”