Carbon Platform Improvements: November 2024

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

Expanded Range of Functional Materials

Introducing EPU Pro to Carbon’s Family of Elastomers

The EPU Pro platform builds upon Carbon’s portfolio of premium elastomers and delivers the high performance that Carbon’s proprietary dual-cure resins are known for while improving usability for production. The platform offers a dual-cure resin that comes in a single container.

When used with Carbon Design Engine, EPU Pro can be tuned for performance, protection, and comfort, with multizonal lattices, generating precise mechanical responses. The EPU Pro platform extends Carbon’s range of elastomeric offerings, and can also incorporate foaming agents to introduce novel haptics, creating a suede-like touch. The material’s enhanced properties enable greater design freedom for curvatures and delicate structures, opening new possibilities for product designers and manufacturers.

New Colors Available for KeyGuard

Last December, we introduced the Keystone Industries® KeyGuard™ resin in black and white for direct-print sports mouthguards on your Carbon printers. Now purple and green are available. KeyGuard’s flexible, high-quality resin is perfect for creating custom-fit sports mouthguards using your Carbon printers. For digitally-designed mouthguards offering variable wall thickness for added comfort and protection, these vibrant new colors allow your lab to offer more options.

Improved Efficiency

Union, Intersection, and Difference (Boolean Operations) in Design Engine

Three new operations are now available to enable users to more capably design a greater range of parts without completing certain steps in separate software:

  • Union: Merge multiple overlapping models into one
  • Intersection: Create a new model based on the overlapping area of two or more models
  • Difference: Remove the overlapping area of one or more models from another
Example: Boolean operations

Collectively, these operations are referred to as Boolean operations, and the functionality should be familiar to users who work with other CAD programs.

Better Part Quality

Kelvin Unit Cell Available for Use with Hexahedron Meshes in Design Engine

As requested by many Design Engine users, lattices can now be generated using the Kelvin unit cell within a hexahedron (hex) mesh.

Striping example
Example: The Kelvin unit cell populating a hex mesh

Hex mesh-based lattices are often chosen for aesthetic reasons rather than performance because of their regular surface patterns and relative softness compared to lattices based on tetrahedron (tet) meshes. In the context of other hex lattice types, Kelvin falls in the middle of the pack for both stiffness and volume fraction (the percentage of the total volume).

See September 2024 platform improvements here.