A new vision for engineering design
Engineering is undergoing a massive transformation. Once slow and constrained by repetitive design loops, traditional workflows are under pressure from the demand for faster iteration, interdisciplinary collaboration, and relentless innovation. That’s why we built ToffeeX—a physics-driven generative design platform that rethinks how to tackle modern engineering challenges. At ToffeeX, our goal is simple: help engineers go further and faster by empowering them with tools to design complex thermo-fluid components and more using high-fidelity physics simulations augmented by AI.
Let’s dive into why it stands apart and how it is reshaping the future of engineering design.
The traditional engineering workflow: A bottleneck to innovation
Traditional workflows often begin with updating existing designs rather than starting from scratch—especially in high-value manufacturing sectors. Building off an existing design imposes constraints that are usually not optimal for the new application. Elements like shape, structure, and function are often carried over even if they don’t fully meet new performance requirements.
Engineers modify these existing designs to improve performance, validate changes through simulations, and eventually build and test prototypes. This cycle repeats until you reach production. This process can be extremely time-consuming—especially when dealing with high-value components that require precision and thorough testing.
Such timelines don’t afford room for the rapid iteration that today’s high-value components demand. The industry needed a way to close the loop between design intent and manufacturable, optimized components—quickly and cost-effectively.
The promise and limits of DfAM tools
Additive Manufacturing (AM) brought hope for faster iterations and more complex designs (to improve thermal management, fluid flow, structural performance, weight reduction, etc.). Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) tools emerged, enabling engineers to create parts previously impossible with traditional methods. However, these tools often inherited the same limitations as conventional approaches because the tools remain largely engineer-driven.
Engineers still manually create designs and iteratively adjust them, and they face challenges when the manufactured part fails to meet performance expectations. These limitations highlight the need for tools like ToffeeX, which empower engineers to design complex thermo-fluid components with precision and efficiency.
A case in point: We collaborated with a client who redesigned a conventional heat sink using a DfAM process. Even with additive manufacturing, this client spent $80,000 and a month of build time to create a single heat exchanger. This highlighted a critical issue—without a physics-driven approach, even advanced tools can lead engineers down less optimal paths. By comparison, ToffeeX’s approach enables engineers to design complex thermo-fluid components that meet both performance and manufacturability needs.
The ToffeeX breakthrough: physics-driven generative design
ToffeeX overcomes the limitations of conventional and DfAM design tools by accelerating much of the design process by applying high-fidelity physics simulations and AI-augmented optimization. We aim to empower engineers to rapidly design complex thermo-fluid components, significantly reducing design time and enhancing performance.
Solving complex engineering challenges
Engineering problems often span multiple disciplines, from fluid dynamics to structural mechanics. ToffeeX integrates many of these areas into a unified workflow, enabling simultaneous optimization across various physics domains. This interdisciplinary approach allows engineers to balance thermal and fluid dynamics and consider real-world constraints like certification, lifetime assessment, and overall operational and capital cost. This holistic approach enables engineers to balance many design goals and create solutions without extensive cross-departmental iterations.
Designing for manufacturing constraints
A great design is only valuable if it can be efficiently manufactured. ToffeeX bridges the gap between design and production by allowing engineers to incorporate real-world constraints—like overhang angles for additive manufacturing, tool paths for machining, and material behavior for processes like stamping and chemical etching. This capability ensures that designs are high-performing and feasible to produce across a range of manufacturing methods.
Versatility across engineering challenges
Unlike many niche design-for-manufacturing tools, ToffeeX adapts to a broad spectrum of engineering problems, from thermal management and fluid manifolds to load-bearing lattices. Our software provides engineers with the freedom to explore unconventional and creative solutions, moving beyond standard approaches to effectively design complex thermo-fluid components.
System-level optimization
ToffeeX enables engineers to optimize entire systems, not just individual components. This system-level optimization improves overall performance without requiring time-consuming redesigns of each part, allowing engineers to design complex thermo-fluid components quickly and effectively. The software even supports optimization for scenarios involving multiple fluids, such as simultaneous heat exchangers or complex manifolds.
Empowering engineers through intuitive design
Engineers remain at the heart of ToffeeX’s design process. Our platform is not a black-box solution; instead, it enhances creativity by giving engineers control over every aspect of the design:
- Customizable design constraints: Engineers define manufacturing limitations, such as periodicity and symmetry, ensuring that the generative process aligns with their goals.
- Interactive design and rapid iterations: Our cloud-based platform allows for quick exploration of design spaces, enabling engineers to test creative ideas and refine concepts in a fraction of the time. ToffeeX encourages exploration by allowing users to replicate parts within a design space, quickly introducing periodicity or rotational patterns, etc.
- User-centric interface: Built for experts and non-experts, ToffeeX streamlines workflows with an intuitive interface that makes it easy to input constraints and objectives.
From digital to physical: seamless transition to production
ToffeeX supports many manufacturing techniques, ensuring that designs seamlessly transition from digital models to physical products. Whether you’re designing complex thermo-fluid components for additive manufacturing, machining, stamping, or chemical etching, ToffeeX optimizes designs for each specific process. Our software’s multi-objective optimization balances thermal efficiency, structural integrity, and manufacturability, producing high-performance designs ready for production.
Real-world application: case studies in transformative design
Ricoh’s heat sink optimization: physics meets manufacturability
To demonstrate how ToffeeX excels in helping engineers design complex thermo-fluid components, Ricoh, a global technology leader in electronics manufacturing, partnered with ToffeeX to address a thermal management challenge in their heat sink design. They wanted to optimize the heat sink for aluminum binder jetting—a manufacturing process that conventional CAD and DfAM tools found challenging to navigate.
Utilizing ToffeeX, Ricoh achieved remarkable improvements: a 31% increase in thermal efficiency over traditional extruded models and a 20% reduction in pressure drop compared to their existing designs.
Unlike previous attempts using DfAM, which resulted in suboptimal performance, the ToffeeX-generated design significantly outperformed the original and DfAM versions and was fully manufacturable. CT scans showed that the printed part matched the simulations precisely, validating the effectiveness of our physics-driven approach.
This collaboration led to a sustainable, high-performance heat sink solution that aligns with Ricoh’s commitment to green technology and efficient product designs.
EOS: advancing heat exchanger design
Designing a plate heat exchanger with alternating layers of hot and cold fluids is a complex endeavor that traditionally requires numerous iterations of CAD modeling and CFD simulations, consuming significant time and resources. In collaboration with EOS, ToffeeX addressed this challenge efficiently and effectively.
Using ToffeeX, we optimized the flow paths for hot and cold fluids within the same design space. By incorporating manufacturability constraints specific to additive manufacturing, we produced a highly efficient and manufacturable design. The result was a heat exchanger that improved heat transfer efficiency by 25% and reduced manufacturing time by 30%.
The printed component closely matched the simulations, validating our approach and demonstrating ToffeeX’s ability to handle intricate thermo-fluid challenges.
Boeing: lightweight, high-performance heat exchanger
We partnered with Boeing to develop an air-nitrogen heat exchanger to meet stringent aerospace performance criteria. ToffeeX’s software optimized the design to achieve all performance targets and exceed weight reduction requirements by 10%. The heat exchanger maintained high performance while being manufacturable with wall thicknesses as thin as 280 microns.
Built at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in Sheffield and successfully tested in Germany, the component demonstrated ToffeeX’s ability to deliver aerospace-grade solutions that withstand rigorous demands—with significantly reduced development cycles.
Airbus: load-bearing heat exchanger structures
Airbus required a thermally efficient heat exchanger to serve as a load-bearing core within a sandwich panel. ToffeeX’s generative design software optimized a lattice structure that balanced thermal performance with mechanical stiffness, resulting in a component 50% stiffer than traditional Nomex honeycomb structures.
During three-point load tests, the structure maintained integrity, with failure occurring only in the bonding material between the carbon fiber and the lattice—not within the lattice itself. This dual-function achievement demonstrates ToffeeX’s capacity to optimize across multiple physics simultaneously, producing efficient, manufacturable, and structurally resilient designs for complex aerospace applications.
Conclusion: empowering engineers to innovate
ToffeeX is redefining what’s possible in engineering design. By combining physics-driven simulations with AI-augmented optimization, we are helping engineers design complex thermo-fluid components faster and more effectively than ever before. From concept to manufacture in as little as two and a half weeks, our approach accelerates time-to-market and lets engineers confidently meet all functional requirements.
We empower engineers to push the boundaries of what’s possible in design and explore their creativity.
In a world that demands efficiency, creativity, and rapid innovation, ToffeeX is not just a software tool—it’s the catalyst for the next era of engineering design.
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