Over the last six months, Gen3D has introduced a series of new features to Sulis Lattice and Sulis Flow including custom unit cells, node inflation, stochastic surface lattices, uniform holed bumps and fractals.
All these new features have been gathered in the v1.10 update, released in March 2022, and aim at giving AM designers more freedom in both modules of the software.
With the latest release of Sulis V1.10, Gen3D said, Sulis Lattice users will be able to create and save their custom unit cells for strut lattices.
This new feature should open up a new range of design opportunities, from tailoring mechanical properties to creating a variety of metamaterials including auxetic structures.
Users should now be able to engineer a lattice structure to suit their product’s requirements such as energy absorption, fluid flow, strength, thermal management and acoustics.
Having a DfAM software enables the designer to create their unit cell, adjust it as they progress and investigate their designs.
Sulis also offers the possibility for AM designers to pick between thousands of pre-existing custom unit cells, that can be copied and pasted into the software, as well as create their own.
Users should be able to modify a unit cell’s coordinate system, spatially vary its strut diameter, make them hollow and even share unit cells with other users.
“We want to give people more options,” said CTO of Gen3D Wesley Essink. “Lattices are everywhere and giving people more features and more customisability helps our customers design and build a wider range of applications.”
These strut lattices are already widely used in medical devices, for energy absorption and surface texturing applications, whereas surface lattices have only recently been discovered and are now added to Sulis V1.10.
The difference is that, while uniform lattice structures absorb equal amounts of energy, surface lattices offer isotropic properties obtained by adding randomness to the surface-based unit cell across a volume.
Stochastic strut lattices can also be isotropic but, Gen3D said, they are not as easy to 3D print as this new lattice type.
Sulis Lattice should now also give designers the option to add a node inflation factor to strut lattices and also the ability to create uniform surface holes or bumps within the lattice.
Surface holes and bumps are useful for surface texturing, as they create drain holes for powder or resin, creating moulds for moulded pulp and many other applications.
Both of these new features were introduced to give designers more control over their additively manufactured parts.
Regarding the Sulis Flow module, aimed at users who work with hydraulic parts, the main new feature of this update is the introduction of fractals, which should allow a uniform way of distributing fluid.
Using Sulis’s drag and drop features, users should be able to easily use fractals to create complex fractal splitters or flow distributors in a few seconds, which are usually challenging to create in CAD.
Gen3D said the newly introduces fractals can be used for heat exchangers, manifolding, weight distribution, flow mixing, and laboratory tools.
