Engineers and scientists working on the latest developments rely on the secure transfer of critical information. The work that goes into 3D design, research and analysis is extensive – and expensive – and a leakage of that data can be detrimental.
What is the best way to share confidential 3D data?
It turns out that it’s not that difficult to increase the security of file sharing. All that’s required is a robust 3D PDF conversion tool like ReportGen.
This is how one structural design organisation uses 3D PDF when sharing costly and highly sensitive stress analysis data with stakeholders:
Turbine Blade FEA Case Study
Designing engine turbine blades requires extreme expertise. The blade is a critical component of the engine – too thick means added weight and lower engine performance, while too thin risks safety and component life span under extreme forces. After performing the necessary and very expensive HPC stress analysis, the last thing an engineer wants is leakage of that expert blade geometry data in a stress report.
Our client, who is at the epicentre of engineering expertise for design and analysis of gas turbine components, including thermal design & analysis, structural design & analysis, secondary flow design & analysis and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), found that valuable data could be protected simply by preparing the analysis reports in 3D PDF.
By preparing a 3D PDF using PDF3D ReportGen, the engineers were able to create effective reports without sacrificing quality or giving away the original blade mesh geometry data.
As a clear example of the effectiveness of using 3D PDF in post-process result distributions, the engineers first created a weighty 1.77 GB data report from an ANSYS FEA stress calculation that showed a single-blade mesh. The model was composed of 1,092,930 Nodes and 1,432,515 Elements. After converting that data to 3D PDF (which took just 5 minutes including simplification and compression), the file size was reduced to only 20 MB with 1 million representative triangles. This stress report was then distributed in the organization and to clients without risk of leaking the original blade mesh design data.
Not only did they secure the data and make sharing easier with the reduced file size, they were also able to add annotations and notes to aid the discussion and decision-making within the PDF.
Key work-flow steps:
- ANSYS FEA blade stress computations performed
- ANSYS FEA post-processor stress contours applied, external surface extraction from solid element mesh
- ANSYS Classic Export WRL contour surface representation
- Load into PDF3D ReportGen with ANSYS FEA import mode settings
- ReportGen refactors contours into optimal assembly node grouping structure
- ReportGen performs 3D contour surface mesh simplification preserving shape and contour boundaries
- ReportGen encodes contour surface in PRC highly compressed tessellation format
- ReportGen produces final 3D PDF document containing light-weight visual representation of FEA contour results, with security enabled to encrypt document contents.
Read more about 3D PDF conversion here.
