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More than a Blog, A Place to Learn, Share, and Laugh a Bit

We started an email newsletter back in 2002 as “The Focus.” We kept that up for some time and then made the plunge into blogging around 2008. Over the years, thousands of students and engineers from around the world have told us that our blog is an invaluable tool to them. If you can’t find what you are looking for, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Efficient and Accurate Simulation of Antenna Arrays in Ansys HFSS

Unit-cell in HFSS HFSS offers different method of creating and simulating a large array. The explicit method, shown in Figure 1(a) might be the first method that comes to our mind. This is where y...

Getting Bulk Properties for Repeated Structures in ANSYS Mechanical with Material Designer

Using Material Designer To Perform Homogenization Studies Editor's Note: 3D Printing and other advanced manufacturing methods are driving the increased use of lattice-type structures in structu...

How to Use Lattice Optimization in ANSYS Mechanical and ANSYS SpaceClaim 19.2

One of the great new features in ANSYS Mechanical 19.2 is the ability to perform a lattice optimization. Accomplished as an option within Topology Optimization, lattice optimization allows us t...

On the Functions of Cellular Structures in Nature

WHY did nature evolve cellular structures? In a previous post, I laid out a structural classification of cellular structures in nature, proposing that they fall into 6 categories. I argued that it...

Cellular Design Strategies in Nature: A Classification

What types of cellular designs do we find in nature? Cellular structures are an important area of research in Additive Manufacturing (AM), including work we are doing here at PADT. As I described in...

Modeling 3D Printed Cellular Structures: Approaches

How can the mechanical behavior of cellular structures (honeycombs, foams and lattices) be modeled? This is the second in a two-part post on the modeling aspects of 3D printed cellular structures. ...

SFF Symposium 2016 Paper: Predicting the Mechanical Behavior of ULTEM-9085 Honeycomb Structures

Our work on 3D printed honeycomb modeling that started as a Capstone project with students from ASU in September 2015 (described in a previous blog post), was published in a peer-reviewed paper rel...

Modeling 3D Printed Cellular Structures: Challenges

In this post, I discuss six challenges that make the modeling of 3D printed cellular structures (such as honeycombs and lattices) a non-trivial matter. In a following post, I will present how som...

Classification of Cellular Solids (and why it matters)

Updated (8/30/2016): Two corrections made following suggestions by Gilbert Peters: the first corrects the use of honeycomb structures in radiator grille applications as being for flow conditioning, th...

The Additive Manufacturing Cellular Solids Research Landscape

I am writing this post after visiting the 27th SFF Symposium, a 3-day Additive Manufacturing (AM) conference held annually at the University of Texas at Austin. The SFF Symposium stands apart from ...