Carbon Platform Improvements: July 2023

Carbon, the idea-to-production platform, is helping you at every stage of digital product development and manufacturing. We are excited to share some of our latest innovations now available to you.

Expanded Range of Functional Materials

Improved Performance with Inert Bake Ovens

EPX 82 and EPX 86FR remain best-in-additive materials for their strength, toughness, and temperature resistance. For applications that require even greater toughness to pass functional testing, baking parts in a low-oxygen environment significantly improves toughness while retaining other desired characteristics.

Carbon has two inert oven recommendations and a recommendation for a nitrogen source, which is required to maintain the low oxygen environment. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the recommended ovens or would like guidance for using equipment you already have.

Better Part Quality

Design Tools Advancements

Both Carbon Design Engine™ Pro and CogniCAD have additional core capabilities to improve the quality of your designs.

CogniCAD now has the ability to add buckling as a constraint

In addition to the current capabilities for static, vibration, and thermo-mechanical topology optimization and FEA, we have recently added the ability to include buckling as a constraint.

Buckling constraints enhance designs from a stability point of view without compromising weight.

Carbon Design Engine Pro now includes additional lattice types and scaffold options

To increase the aesthetic and performance options for your latticed parts, we’ve added Hex Meshes and new lattice types to Carbon Design Engine Pro.

We’ve seen customers use these new lattice types (including custom, user-defined types) in helmet, grip, and footwear applications, like the VICIS ZERO2 Matrix helmet pads. All Carbon Design Engine Pro customers will now have the Hex Mesh option in their toolbar, and can pick from new lattice types in the Strut Lattice operation.

You can upload and populate custom unit cells when using Hex Mesh. Custom unit cells are defined by the start end of all struts in the unit cell, like this:

See the Hex Mesh section in the Design Engine Tools & Features Carbon Academy lesson to learn more. All affected sections throughout Carbon Academy have been updated to include this new feature.

See May 2023 platform improvements here.