How to create a lattice structure for only a specific region of my design

Objective:

Learn how to apply lattices to only specific regions of a design.

Applies to:

  • Latticing

Procedure:

There are several ways to accomplish this task, but the most straightforward is to use your CAD system to split the part into multiple regions before importing it to nTop. If you can isolate the region you want to lattice as its own CAD body, it will make the process easier and provide better control over your design.

1. Import your multi-body CAD part and extract helpful variables. For this example, we're going to extract the following CAD features:

  • The CAD Body of the area we want to lattice
  • The CAD Body we want to keep
  • The CAD Faces we are using to generate the lattice cell map.

Extract the CAD Bodies from the imported CAD part.

2. Convert the CAD bodies to implicit bodies. We will use these later downstream in the workflow.

Convert the CAD Bodies to implicit bodies.

3. Create a cell map using the Cell Map Between CAD Faces block, and the two faces we extracted earlier.

Create a cell map using the Cell Map between CAD Faces block.

4. Use the new cell map and a Graph Unit Cell block to generate the Periodic Lattice.

Generate the Periodic Lattice using the cell map and a Graph unit cell.

5. Using the Trim Lattice block, we can reduce the lattice structure to only remain within our REPLACE IMPLICIT region.

Use a Trim Lattice block to confine the lattice to only beams inside the specified domain.

6. Finally we can use a Boolean Union block to merge the lattice with the original frame of the CAD body to create our finished part!

Use a Boolean Union block to merge the trimmed lattice with the original CAD frame.

Are you still having issues? Contact the support team, and we’ll be happy to help!

Download the Example file:

More on this topic:

Keywords:

 cad lattice bodies multiple region prepare how to area specific 
Was this article helpful?