Carbon Shares Proprietary Software to Fast-Track Product Development

3D printing company gives Design Engine access to subscribers, removing hurdles for the creation of lattice designs.

Twisting lattice structure featuring curved surfaces, flat surfaces and sharp edges simulated in the Carbon Design Engine (left). Final product (right). (Images courtesy of Carbon.)

Carbon is one of the world’s leading additive manufacturing companies specializing in super-fast 3D printers. It creates disruptive alternatives to foam thanks to its proprietary method called Carbon Digital Light Synthesis (DLS). In an innovative move, Carbon has announced that all of its subscribers will now have access to their Carbon Design Engine software, the lattice generating technology behind their printers.

Phil DeSimone, Chief Product and Business Development Officer, and Hardik Kabaria, Director of Software Engineering (R&D), discussed their new initiative with engineering.com.

3D printing enables the production of latticed parts that can deliver considerably better mechanical performance than those produced via traditional production methods. Carbon, based in Redwood City, California, was founded in 2013 when its CEO, Joseph DeSimone invented the DLS method along with Ed Samulski and Alex and Nikita Ermoshkin. The proprietary method, inspired by the T-1000 from Terminator II, was introduced in 2015.

Essentially, DLS is a 3D printing method that uses photopolymerization of resins to create smooth-sided solid objects in a variety of shapes, including lattices. The continuous process begins with a pool of liquid photopolymer resin. Part of the pool bottom is transparent to ultraviolet light (the “window”). An ultraviolet light beam shines through the window, illuminating the precise cross-section of the object. The light causes the resin to solidify.

The object rises slowly enough to allow the resin to flow under and maintain contact with the bottom of the object. An oxygen-permeable membrane lies below the resin, which creates a “dead zone” (persistent liquid interface) preventing the resin from attaching to the window (photopolymerization is inhibited between the window and the polymerizer). Unlike stereolithography, the printing process is continuous and can create objects about 25 to 100 times faster than commercial 3D printing methods.

Due to the continuous printing process, the material is cured without visible layers. The objects are also isotropic, meaning that their interior makeup is consistent in every direction, unlike items made with most other commercial 3D printing processes. Additionally, the parts are stronger overall due to the curing chemistry of the materials offered by Carbon.

Arguably, one of the most famous products designed using Carbon’s technology was the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoe. More recently, to offset the shortage of COVID-19 testing swabs, Resolution Medical utilized Carbon’s Design Engine to produce a lattice swab. It enabled Resolution to prototype, optimize and produce the swab within 20 days.

The software has also been employed in the design of critical lattice products like the Specialized S-Works Power Saddle with Mirror technology, and CCM Super Tacks X helmets developed for COVID-19 testing.

Resolution Medical Swabs. (Image courtesy of Carbon.)

Initially, Carbon customers subscribed to the printers through a rental program and developed the required designs using their own tools. However, traditional design tools are limited in their additive manufacturing support—particularly for complex geometries like lattices—which makes designing functional parts difficult. “On average it can take 18 to 24 months to bring a consumer product to market,” Phil pointed out.

The Carbon team recognized this when working on the midsole with Adidas.

“We realized that a lot of people had great ideas for how to take advantage of a lattice, but the design tools were not necessarily there to do it quickly or efficiently,” said Phil. “Those midsoles have tens of thousands of struts running through them. Each one, at that point in time, had to be hand-manipulated in software or design. That is not scalable.

“This was especially true when creating products of every half-size and width, and separately for men and women’s shoes. It would necessitate an exorbitant number of manual design manipulations in CAD in order to get the products, which is definitely not feasible.”

The Design Engine generates lattices quickly. Latticed parts require less material and time to print. (Image courtesy of Carbon.)

Since its inception, Carbon had built up an expert team that could help customers delivering advanced products, and created a backlog of new products that needed to be developed. However, this created a bottleneck and caused delays in the exploration and delivery of these products. In order to empower engineers globally and simplify lattice design generation, Carbon developed the Design Engine to collaborate on design projects with customers. All Carbon subscribers will now be given direct access to the company’s software to gain design control within the product development lifecycle.

“We built the Design Engine, particularly its lattice functionality, as a way to help go through quick iterations and design products on the fly to take advantage of the Carbon printers,” explained Phil. “So this tool will allow them to do a lot of that work and democratize the knowledge of lattice. We enable the development of advanced components and products—going from idea to production in the same day.”

The Design Engine automates the process of creating performance-oriented lattices, saving design engineers significant time and effort.

“The idea of lattices has to be easy and accessible to mechanical engineers,” explained Kabaria. “It should not need a lot of hurdles of drawing struts or anything of that complex nature.”

The Design Engine can predict lattice performance prior to generation. Here, for the design of a puck, the tool suggests lattice parameters to achieve a desired volume fraction to lower the part’s weight. (Image courtesy of Carbon.)

The cloud-based application has the computational power to generate complex shapes quickly and efficiently. The Design Engine software has a fully interactive user interface and offers product teams the ability to produce five different types of conformal lattices. The software creates conformal lattices that robustly populate even the most challenging design surfaces, eliminating tedious design revisions post-generation. 

The Design Engine user interface displays a latticed CAD file for the puck, with a history of input parameters and operations in the sidebar. (Image courtesy of Carbon.)

Due to its integration with Carbon’s platform and materials, the Design Engine can predict lattice performance prior to lattice generation, streamlining design optimization. It also offers built-in guidance to help engineers develop successful parts.  

“The user should not have to learn about the kind of lattice to be used or which parameters to pick,” stated Kabaria. “We took the knowledge of which lattice structure is needed for different performance types, what parameters need to be chosen, the diameter of the struts, etc., and developed a software tool based on that knowledge.

“So even engineers who do not have much knowledge of the lattice can still easily use the software. They can get some products, test them, iterate them and eventually put those parts to production.”

The final product, the puck, after design has been completed. (GIF courtesy of Carbon.)

The Design Engine has been launched in beta with Carbon’s current customers—a wide-ranging base including consumer products, automotive, packaging, construction, electronics, industrial, aeronautical and medical industries.

“The next phase of the rollout is to make it more broadly available across other printing technologies,” described Phil. “Whether it be metals or something else, we think there is a huge role this engine can play in driving applications across the entire industry, whether they use our printers or not. This is the first step in Carbon maturing out of just being a printer provider. The aim is to really help customers through the product development process to deliver better products faster and at scale.”

Kabaria, agreed: “We think of it as the first development. The lattice itself has a lot of complexities, and the current tool has constraints that we want to eventually take out. For example, we do not want to limit the software to lattices, but open to a broader set of structures with more mechanical properties. We are figuring out which features benefit users the most, and will certainly have more coming.”

“We are actively looking at other opportunities beyond this first step,” concluded Phil. “Our aim is to help our customers iterate their designs faster, not just help them bring that idea to the physical world where the printing takes place. We are going to play more up and down the entire product development of value chain, and work on how we help customers through that successfully.”

Carbon was already providing prints a hundred times faster than existing technologies, and is now offering even more efficiencies by reducing the time it takes to design and prototype. Thanks to the innovative move by Carbon, it will be exciting to see the new breakthroughs in design and production that come out of this huge opportunity for manufacturers.