During RAPID + TCT 2023, General Lattice announced the beta release of its new digital materials platform, Frontier. Frontier is a free-to-search library of validated mechanical property data designed to support users in the selection of the best lattice, material, and hardware combination according to the company.
Although there was no time for a meeting in Chicago, in the week after the event TCT spoke to the team at General Lattice over a video call to learn all about the new platform.
The Frontier platform democratises the use of lattice structures by treating them as traditional materials with tangible properties. It provides a free-to-search library of validated mechanical property data, to support users in choosing the best lattice, material, and hardware combination for their project.
The system allows users to search, analyse, and order physical samples for hands-on evaluation, which the company says eliminates costly guess and check workflows. According to General Lattice, the future of manufacturing is “undeniably digital”, and digital materials delivers a “quantum leap” in product development capabilities.
Nick Florek, Co-Founder and CEO of General Lattice, told TCT: “We define digital materials as combining a lattice geometry with a particular hardware and material platform. The idea is we can use geometry to control performance of that bulk material. It kind of came to be because for the last four years or so, we’ve been really focused on helping customers on a service basis through computational design, and every project that we’ve done has typically started with printing some samples of a lattice, testing them and picking the best one, and hope that we find something that works well.
“We were constantly doing this and so we had the thought of, could we get ahead by doing two things. One, pre-validating the lattice so that we can just search for them rather than having to simulate and iterate, but also can we start to think of lattice as a material replacement? So, taking the complexity out of it for the customer and saying, you use this traditional foam material, we can offer you three or four different digital materials that far exceed the mechanical properties that you’re already experiencing.
General Lattice
A screenshot of the Frontier interface.
Speaking about what sets Frontier apart, Florek added: “You can directly integrate this digital material just like your traditional materials today, and I think that’s the biggest differentiator between what Frontier’s trying to do and what other tools in the marketplace offer, is rather than giving designers and engineers a lattice toolbox, we’re giving them digital material solutions, and direct replacements for what exists.”
The General Lattice team told TCT about how feedback from customers benefitted from this project. The team said that customers didn’t necessarily care about the details of adjusting the beam diameter, or strut length, or unit cell, and what they are looking for is to utilise the ‘uniqueness’ of the lattice geometry to offer a superior performing product.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
Prior to the introduction of Frontier, General Lattice would typically spend a month or a few months, as well as thousands of dollars, trying to profile small samples of lattice, and over that time, the customer might not find the solution they were looking for according to Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) Marek Moffett. The customer will have spent thousands of dollars before being in the design space.
Moffet added: “Instead of searching, we can now say we already have a pretty good idea of the structure that needs to go into your shape. Around 80% to 90% of the customers don’t really care what the lattice is, and they don’t even want to learn all the different lattices, the idea is ‘Can I put this mechanical property into my shape?’ and that’s what Frontier aims to streamline as a service.”
A platform such as Frontier is something that General Lattice has been wanting to achieve for a number of years, according to Moffett and Florek. The Co-Founders told TCT that around three years ago the team first spoke about building a database, and began efforts on making it reality in 2022. In October 2022 to May 2023, the team spent their time getting the materials library built and started working with platform partners.
General Lattice says that having platform partners who are hardware and material OEMs is an important thing, as it creates a unified source of information for the marketplace. One of the participants in the platform is BASF Forward AM. Speaking about the value the partners see in the system, Florek said: “At the end of the day, they’re trying to sell their materials, and the more avenues they can market them, the better. They see value in having it as a centralised source because that is going to be more beneficial for the customer.”
General Lattice begun with elastomer polymer materials on the platform, with a target around foam replacement applications, but as the database grows, the company told TCT it will profile for different mechanical properties and expand to include rigid polymers, metals, ceramics, and open it up to different industries in which it can serve.
The team says that the ultimate goal of the platform is to touch as many applications as possible, and to drive the adoption of lattice structures into everyday products, and that Frontier is a ‘huge first step’ for that.
General Lattice
An example of properties of a lattice with Ultrasint TPU01 material on an HP system.
Florek said: “We initially did compression testing, so squishing the lattices which generates a stress strain curve. From that you can pull a handful of different mechanical properties such as Youngs Modulus, Plateau Stress, Densification Strain. That’s just where we started with how we present information, and as you adjust those parameters, it filters different results. Then you can click in, view that information, and order samples so you can actually get one delivered to you if you wanted to do a squish test or a more specific type of mechanical property testing that you want to conduct on it that we haven’t shown on the database.”
The team revealed to TCT that later in 2023, the company plans to release an integration tool for the platform, so that users can upload a CAD file and put the digital material into their design space. Once the integration tool is added, users will be able to do some of the design work themselves.
Moffett added: “From a users’s perspective what is really exciting, not even from someone in the additive world, say an application engineer is going to mould something, there are material databases that exist. That’s part of the traditional design engineering process, say 'I need to make or mould some sort of impeller,' I have all of the mechanical properties and requirements that it needs to meet such as certain stiffness, certain thermal properties. I can go and search my raw material database and find, 'okay ABS might work, ABS carbon filled might work, so I know these two pellets are what I could potentially use to make my part.' Same thing with this database, instead of going and searching and creating almost unlimited amount of parameters to your lattice, you can just search the properties you are looking for and we can just give you what you’re looking for as opposed to you doing all of this yourself.”
The platform is currently in the beta stage, and General Lattice says it will continue to iterate, adjust and improve it in the future, with the goal of making the search more intuitive and easy to understand so even non-engineers who are less familiar with mechanical properties can look for options that might work for them.
Speaking about the search feature of the database, Florek said: “If you only wanted to look at stuff that was printed on a Photocentric, for example, you can filter out all the other hardware platforms because maybe that’s what you have in house or if you’ve already narrowed it down and want to work with a resin-based photopolymer. The idea is to make connections to the OEMs, and help drive awareness and accelerate AM applications in general through what’s commercially available on the hardware material side.”
Moffett added: “Again, from an application engineer’s point of view, for companies looking to get into additive, it’s a really exciting use case for an application engineer to spend no modelling time, buy no software, do no printing, but be able to go to our free database, take some of these properties shown that we have and say to their manager, this is potentially outperforming how we’re making this part.”
The founders said that with some projects, sometimes up to 20,000 USD and months of time could be spent on just trying to find a lattice structure, but Frontier now allows them to do that for free. The platform will remain free to use, but the company says that when the integration tool is rolled out, which allows users to engage with the digital material and put it into their products, a fee will be introduced for that.
When the platform launched at the beginning of May 2023, three materials across three different unit cells were included, through EOS, Photocentric, and BASF Forward AM. The company revealed to TCT that during the RAPID + TCT show in Chicago, there were ‘great discussions’ with different hardware and material OEMs. Speaking on this, Florek said: “We expect upwards of at least 10 different materials across 10 different platforms, so basically 10 partners to be onboarded here within the next couple of months.”
The CEO said that the platform is open for different hardware and material partners to join, and the company wants people to reach out.
Florek added: “I think what this provides is a really nice alternative option to what exists in the market, you’re basically not having to design the lattice, we’ve done that work for you, and we’re giving you an easier way to integrate.”
General Lattice played a role in the Wilson 3D printed airless basketball prototype, providing computational design for the project. Florek and Moffet spoke to TCT as part of an in-depth conversation with all the creators and the brains behind the innovation, which you can read here.
The Wilson basketball on the General Lattice stand at RAPID + TCT 2023.
