9. Thick laminates

9.1. Laminate: Thickness offset

Note

New beta feature in 1.3.9

The layer creation will, by default, not take any variation in laminate thickness into account. For thin laminates (< 5 mm), and only slightly curved surfaces, this is usually not a problem. But imagine placing material with 1.0 mm thickness on a cylindrical surface with a radius of 100 mm: after ten layers your effective radius has increased to 110 mm but the positioning of the patches will still be performed on the original surface. This leads to gaps in the layup that become more and more severe with increasing laminate thickness. Artist Studio’s Thickness offset feature lets you take this offset into account by modifying the underlying surface.

Warning

Thickness offset is a beta feature. It is not yet recommended for productive use.

Enabling thickness offset

Use the following steps to enable the feature:

  1. Use a fine mesh. The accuracy of the thickness offset is directly affected by the mesh quality, esp. mesh size and uniformity. Visualize the mesh and check whether it fits your purposes. If not, perform a remesh.

  2. In your surface extractions, there must be one extraction that contains the complete area that you want to take into account for offset creation. Since offset creation is a time-consuming process, it is recommended to select only the surface that is actually needed for the offset. All other surface extractions that you’re planning to use, must be a subset of this extraction.

  3. After clicking on the ‘’Laminate’’ icon you can activate the thickness offset and select the previously created offset surface. The settings, that you choose here, can’t be modified any longer once your first layer is created. The icon of the selected surface extraction changes to highlight that this is the base surface.

../_images/activate_thickness_offset.png

  1. You can now continue to create your laminate. There are certain restrictions that are presented in the following section.

Restrictions

Since thick laminates is a beta feature certain restrictions apply:

  • Only the topmost layer can be modified. This means:

    • No layer, except for the topmost, should be modified or deleted

    • The ordering of the layers must not be modified

    • You have to delete the complete laminate before deactivating thickness offset

    • No remesh should be performed

  • Not all methods of curve creation are supported: parallel slave curve offset can currently only be used together with an extracted master curve.

  • Boundary extractions should be created from the edges of the surface (i.e. no free edges), unless you can make sure that the boundary is aligned with the offset surface (e.g. first layer).

  • Any modification of the CAD model (deleting entities or importing additional parts) is discouraged.

  • Always check that face and patch normals are aligned correctly, otherwise unexpected results might occur. See the section on thickness distribution plots for additional information on this topic (thickness offset and thickness plot share some algorithms).