Cell Size Adaptivity
Cell size adaptivity allows for greater control in conforming a lattice to smaller features in the design space.
Cell size selection in Design Engine allows for choosing the main cell size as part of the unit cell. The main cell size may not work well for small features, even when the size works for the rest of the part. Cell size adaptivity allows you to select an alternate smaller cell size, for better conformity to smaller features. In doing so, you can keep most of the lattice less dense, but allow a tighter conformity at the surface where needed.
Cell Size Guidelines provide basic recommendations for cell size adaptivity based on your overall part geometry.
Design Engine also offers multiple tools to analyze (either your lattice or your geometry) and provide feedback for cell size adaptivity: Adaptivity and Analysis. Users can use the analysis feedback to manually select a smaller cell size for smaller features via cell size adaptivity or can directly apply suggested cell sizes where advised via a cell size adaptivity table.
Alternatively, you can use the provided feedback to inform you on areas of the design space warranting either a design change or separate Zones.
There are multiple workflow paths to use the analysis tools and enable cell size adaptivity, illustrated in this path diagram. Reference Analysis and Adaptivity for their respective workflows. From there,
In this example, most of the part is large and meets performance needs with a cell size of 12 mm.
When using a main cell size of 12 mm and no cell size adaptivity, the smallest feature does not fully populate with lattice struts.
Cell size suggestions in the small feature area:
- Analysis tool suggests a cell size of 5.79 - 5.8 mm
- Thickness & Adaptivity tool suggests a cell size of 6.46 - 6.5 mm
Cell Size Adaptivity
- Select a smaller cell size from the cell size adaptivity pull-down menu
- Options are 1/1, 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 of the main cell size
- 1/2 of the main cell size closely matches the recommendations in this example (6 mm)
Cell Size Adaptivity Result
Voronoi - 12 mm main cell size with 1/2 of main (6 mm) cell size adaptivity
Instead of selecting a single cell size from the adaptivity pull down menu, you can choose to use the analysis data points to adapt cell size exactly as analyzed in only the areas suggested.
Standard Cell Size Adaptivity Results
Note how the standard cell size adaptivity results will use the smaller cell size for conformity throughout the part, not just in the area of the small feature size.
Analysis Results
Using the Analysis data points for adaptivity applies conformity only in the area where a different cell size was recommended.
Thickness & Adaptivity Results
The Thickness & Adaptivity data points, however, did not make a difference in the resulting lattice. The end of the small feature reads the full depth of the part, which does not yield a smaller suggested cell size.
Refer to Adaptivity and Analysis for more information on when to use each tool per your geometry.