Objective:
Close the open beams of a trimmed lattice.
This procedure isn't recommended if your part has convex elements.
There are two possible procedures for achieving this objective, both methods are explained below.
Procedure 1:
1. Extract all of the vertices of your trimmed lattice.
- Go to the Properties tab of your lattice body and locate the lattice property. The lattice property contains information about the graph of your lattice.
- Expand this property and drag the vertices into your notebook.
- Convert the thickness value of your lattice into a design variable called "Lattice Beam Thickness" to reuse in other steps throughout the workflow. In this example, the Lattice Beam Thickness value is constant.
2. Use these vertices to create a volume mesh using the Delaunay Volume Mesh block. This function creates a mesh composed of tetrahedral elements based on all of the vertices of the trimmed lattice.
- Extract the surface mesh chip from the properties panel of the Delaunay Volume Mesh block in order to derive a new exterior network of beams to join to our trimmed lattice.
3. Use the Lattice from Surface Mesh block to extract the edges of each mesh face and convert them into beams in a new lattice body.
- Change the Method parameter to arrive at different arrangements of lattice beams.
- Use the Lattice Thickness variable to apply the same thickness to this lattice body as your original trimmed lattice body.
4. The resulting lattice from this operation may require some additional fine-tuning in order to get the desired outcome you're looking for. We have a handful of super useful Lattice Beams filters currently available. In this specific example, we'll use the Filter Beams by Containment block to remove the top and bottom beams of our cylindrical lattice. If filtering beams by a volume isn't the best approach for your application, you can also filter by a beam's angle, length, connectivity (closed, floating, open), and thickness.
5. Now that we have a network of beams to fully close off our original trimmed lattice, use the Merge Lattice block to arrive at one single lattice body. Then we will remove any open beams using the Remove Open Beams block to create our final lattice.
- Input the original trimmed lattice and the new exterior lattice into the Lattices input.
Procedure 2:
1. For this example, we will use a lattice cube with a sphere cutout. The goal is to eliminate the open beams from where the sphere was removed.
2. As opposed to how it was shown in Step 1, we instead want to use a Boolean Subtract block to remove the Sphere from the Cube initially.
3. Next step is to create a mesh of the new body using the Mesh from Implicit Body block.
4. Use the Random Points in Body block to generate points for the lattice.
5. Finally, input everything into a Voronoi Volume Lattice block to create your closed beams lattice.
And that’s it! You’ve successfully closed the open beams of a trimmed lattice.
Are you still having issues? Reach out to the support team, and we’ll be happy to help!
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