THE POWER OF ADMS

Spherene is a Swiss additive-manufacturing software company that develops design technology based on Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS).

In simple terms, Spherene provides software that lets engineers and designers create lighter, stronger, and more efficient parts faster by optimizing geometry at a fundamental level.

Instead of using conventional lattices or repetitive infill structures, Spherene’s ADMS adapts continuously to loads, shapes, scales, and boundary conditions.

Some key points:

• What it does: Transforms CAD models into high-performance, 3D-print-ready structures that minimize weight while maximizing performance.

• How it works: ADMS adapts the density and surface geometry locally (unlike traditional gyroids or TPMS), enabling support-free printing and highly functional metamaterials.

• Who uses it: Aerospace, automotive, energy, medical, footwear, and construction companies that want stronger, lighter, or more sustainable components.

• Integration: Available as plugins for CAD/CAE platforms like Rhino/Grasshopper, Autodesk Fusion, and nTop, with more integrations planned.

Think of Spherene as a design engine for advanced geometries and metamaterial: it gives manufacturers the ability to push performance and sustainability beyond what’s possible with conventional design tools.

Spherene’s ADMS — The Next Evolution of Minimal Surfaces

Spherene’s Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS) represent a new class of minimal surface, generated uniquely for each design in a single intelligent step that considers all functional and geometric requirements simultaneously. This is a fundamentally new approach — unlike TPMS, which depend on repeating, grading, and trimming unit cells, ADMS adapts continuously and locally, conforming perfectly to the part’s true intent.

Isotropy Where It Matters

ADMS delivers near-perfect isotropy, providing uniform mechanical performance in every direction. Unlike conventional TPMS lattices that introduce directional weaknesses, ADMS allows engineers to design with confidence — ensuring predictable behavior under complex, multi-directional loads, eliminating weak points, and preventing premature failure.

Support-Free by Design

ADMS produces smooth, continuous geometries that are manufacturable with little or no supports. This means less material waste, shorter print times, and minimal post-processing — cutting costs while unlocking unprecedented design freedom.

From Material to Metamaterial

ADMS doesn’t just optimize geometry — it redefines material performance. By structuring matter into adaptive minimal surfaces, Spherene transforms ordinary metals, polymers, and ceramics into advanced metamaterials with tailored mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. The result: lighter, stronger, and smarter materials engineered for applications from energy absorption to heat dissipation.

Engineered for Reliability

A Spherene-based design exhibits no weak directions under multi-axis loading, thanks to its inherent isotropy. With just a few simulation cycles and parameter refinements, performance can be fine-tuned to minimize stress concentrations and maximize resilience — even under extreme deformation or impact.

ADMS (SPHERENE) VS. TPMS (GYROID & Co.)

Minimal surfaces have long played a role in additive manufacturing — most notably as gyroids and other Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) like Schwarz P, Diamond, or Lidinoid. But TPMS are limited: they rely on repeating unit cells, require trimming and patching, and often compromise performance while restricting adaptability.

A Spherene represents a new class of minimal surface, generated uniquely for each design in a single adaptive step. Instead of forcing repetitive cells into complex geometries, Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS) conform intelligently to the part’s shape and functional requirements, placing material only where it’s needed.

Create Complex Adaptive Structures in Minutes — Amend Them in Seconds

Designing with Spherene is fast and intuitive — complex adaptive structures can be created in minutes and amended in seconds when needed. This approach eliminates weak points and inefficiencies, transforming any base material into a high-performance metamaterial that unlocks entirely new mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties.

DESIGN APPROACH

• ADMS (Spherene): Generated uniquely for each design in a single adaptive step, starting directly from the part’s envelope and functional requirements. Seamlessly conformal to any geometry — no trimming, patching, or distortion required.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Built from repeating unit cells that must be trimmed, patched, or distorted to fit complex geometries, requiring time-consuming manual intervention.

GEOMETRIC INTEGRITY

• ADMS (Spherene): Maintains perfect minimal surface continuity across the entire part — even around openings, keep-outs, and curved boundaries.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Boolean trimming and distortion break surface continuity, creating irregular geometry and bloated data.

ISOTROPY & PERFORMANCE

• ADMS (Spherene): Isotropic by design, delivering predictable mechanical performance in all directions with no stress concentrations once refined.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Directional weaknesses persist due to periodic repetition, leading to stress concentrations under load

DENSITY & EFFICIENCY

• ADMS (Spherene): Natively adapts density and wall thickness for maximum efficiency, automatically responding to loads, materials, and print parameters.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Density must be manually adjusted by scaling cells and wall thickness, often inefficient and damaging to surface quality.

MANUFACTURING BENEFITS

• ADMS (Spherene): Smooth, continuous, and largely support-free geometries enable effortless powder evacuation, clean prints, and shorter production cycles.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Often requires support structures and produces trapped powder, increasing material usage and design time

WORKFLOW & AUTOMATION

• ADMS (Spherene): API-driven generation from envelopes and fields allows automated workflows, rapid iteration, and mass customization with just a few clicks.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Manual trimming, grading, and support setup slow down workflows; variant generation remains highly iterative.

DE-POWDERING

• ADMS (Spherene): Features smooth, open internal channels that ensure effortless powder evacuation and reliable, repeatable production.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Complex internal passages often trap powder, making de-powdering inefficient or incomplete.

OUTCOME

• ADMS (Spherene): A new class of metamaterials — lighter, stronger, isotropic, and more efficient. From implants to aerospace brackets, ADMS redefines what’s possible in additive manufacturing.
• TPMS (Gyroid): Enables lightweight structures but remains limited by anisotropy, trimming artifacts, and inefficient workflows.

FACIT: 

ADMS goes far beyond TPMS — it redefines them.

• While gyroids and other TPMS opened the door to minimal surfaces in lightweight design, Spherene’s Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS) take the concept to an entirely new level.
• Conformal by nature, isotropic under load, and effortlessly manufacturable, ADMS integrates seamlessly into automated workflows — enabling applications from faster mold cooling in footwear to lighter aerospace brackets and porous medical implants that promote bone integration.
• Unlike lattices or TPMS, Spherene’s ADMS adapt intelligently to any geometry, placing material only where it’s needed and ensuring predictable, support-free performance. This makes adoption faster, validation simpler, and mass customization practical at scale.
• More than a geometry engine, ADMS is a new material architecture class — one that transforms metals, polymers, and ceramics into metamaterials with tailored mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. The result: stronger, lighter, and more efficient parts — and a completely new design paradigm for additive manufacturing.
• Designing with Spherene is fast and intuitive — complex adaptive structures can be created in minutes and amended in seconds, unlocking an entirely new level of speed, flexibility, and performance in additive manufacturing.

Spherene's ADMS is much better and easier to design then TPMS.

While both are minimal surfaces characterized by zero mean curvature and two continuous labyrinths, that’s where the similarities end.

• ADMS (Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces) are dynamic and adapting locally to functional requirements, geometry, and loading conditions to deliver truly optimized performance.
• TPMS (Triply Periodic Minimal Surface like Gyroids, Schwarz P, Diamond & Co.) are static and repetitive.

Think of a gyroid unit cell as a brick for building a wall. It works well in repetition, but the moment you add doors, windows, or corners, you need to cut bricks, insert beams, or build arches.

By contrast, a Spherene is the complete wall from the start — already including doors, windows, and niches, whether round or rectangular.

This is where the power of Spherene becomes clear.

• It is generated outside-in — starting from the overall part shape and every interface requirement, then filling the interior seamlessly.
• Inherently surface-conformal, ADMS handles complexity effortlessly: keep-out zones, variable thickness, joints, and latches are no harder to accommodate than a simple cube or sphere.

Now imagine filling a sphere with a gyroid. The unit cell is easy to repeat, but fitting a cubic pattern into a curved shape is tedious and fragile. Distorting a doubly curved surface without breaking its zero mean curvature is nearly impossible, and trimming away the excess only creates irregular geometry, data bloat, and processing headaches.

The difference becomes fundamental:

Spherenes are isotropic, gyroids are not.

Periodic patterns inevitably introduce directional weaknesses because they must end on one side exactly as they began on the other. Spherenes, like spheres, achieve a perfectly balanced distribution of face normals — the hallmark of isotropy — even though their local detail may appear random.

A third distinction lies in configuration.

With gyroids, density is changed by scaling the unit cell and wall thickness — often an inefficient compromise that distorts the structure and breaks its minimal surface properties. Spherene offers full geometric control, enabling native, continuous gradients in density and thickness-to-density ratio, allowing optimization for the given load case and printing process.

MANUFACTURING & INDUSTRIAL

• Molding & Tooling – Conformal cooling channels in injection molds for faster cycle times and reduced defects.

• Heat Exchangers – Lightweight, high-efficiency thermal management structures.

• General Manufacturing – Support-free geometries that minimize waste, reduce machine time, and simplify post-processing.

• Prototyping & Production – Lightweight designs that accelerate iteration cycles and scale smoothly into manufacturing.

FOOTWEAR & CONSUMER PRODUCTS

• Footwear Midsoles & Soles – Tailored energy absorption and rebound for performance footwear.

• Mold Components for Footwear – Improved cooling, enabling higher throughput in mass production.

• Sports & Consumer Goods – Lightweight, durable parts with customizable stiffness-to-weight ratios.

MEDICAL & LIFE SCIENCES

• Orthopedic Implants – Porous, bone-mimicking structures promoting osteointegration and weight reduction.

• Custom Prosthetics – Patient-specific, lightweight prosthetics balancing strength and comfort.

• Medical Devices – Durable, lightweight housings and implants with tuned thermal or mechanical properties.

• Bioreactors & Lab Devices – Porous structures for controlled fluid flow and biological applications.

CONSTRUCTION & ARCHITECTURE

• Concrete / Cement 3D Printing – Lighter structural elements with reduced material use and novel forms.

• Load-Bearing Components – Strength-optimized designs for sustainable construction.

• Architectural & Artistic Installations – Organic, expressive geometries blending aesthetics with structural integrity.

• Sustainable Construction – Designs that reduce material consumption and carbon footprint in large-scale projects.

AEROSPACE, AUTOMOTIVE & MOBILITY

• Aerospace Brackets & Structural Parts – Significant weight savings without compromising mechanical performance.

• Crash & Energy Absorption – Tailored foams and deformation zones for safety-critical applications.

• Drone & Satellite Components – Ultra-light, predictable, high-performance structures.

• EV Components – Lightweight housings and supports to extend range and efficiency.

THERMAL & ENERGY APPLICATIONS

• Mold Cooling & Tooling – Embedded channels for faster heat removal.

• Electronics Cooling – Heat sinks and thermal pathways optimized for compact devices.

• Industrial Thermal Systems – Customized geometries for better temperature regulation in energy-intensive processes.

• Turbines & Energy Conversion – Optimized thermal paths for efficiency in power generation systems.

AUDIO, VIBRATION & DYNAMICS

• Acoustic Control – Structures tuned to filter or absorb sound frequencies for speakers, housings, and enclosures.

• Vibration Damping – Tailored energy absorption for machines, vehicles, and consumer devices.

• Noise Isolation – Customized ADMS patterns to reduce sound transmission in sensitive applications.

• Frequency Tuning – Precise filtering or amplification of specific vibration and sound ranges.

FUTURE & EMERGING APPLICATIONS

• Metamaterial Engineering – Transforming ordinary materials into high-performance metamaterials with tailored stiffness, acoustic, or thermal behavior.

• Multi-Material Printing – Combining metals, polymers, or ceramics for hybrid properties.

• Robotics & Automation – Lightweight robotic arms, joints, and supports balancing stiffness and damping for precision applications.

• Space Exploration – Lightweight, radiation- and impact-tolerant components for spacecraft and sustainable planetary habitats.

DESIGN, ART & CREATIVE

• Art Installations – Sculptural forms achievable only through ADMS and additive manufacturing.

• Product & Furniture Design – Functional yet aesthetic surfaces and structures.

• Fashion & Jewelry – Lightweight, intricate designs pushing the limits of creativity.

• Architectural Design – Organic structures that merge engineering performance with aesthetic expression.

Integration with Design & Engineering Tools

Seamless integration with existing design, engineering, and simulation software is key to adoption. Spherene has been built as a cloud-based API that accepts simple control inputs and returns fully generated ADMS geometries. This architecture ensures compatibility across platforms and enables engineers to access ADMS directly within their preferred environments. Today, Spherene is available as a plugin for

• Rhino
• Grasshopper
• Autodesk Fusion
• nTop 

with support for additional CAD and CAE systems already in development.

Workflow Integration and Interoperability

With a few clicks, your design becomes a Spherene metamaterial. Spherene accepts bodies, surfaces, and meshes from any CAD system as input geometries. Field data can be supplied as scalar or vector values with coordinates, created directly in the host software or computed based on external sources such as simulation outputs.

After computation, the Spherene API returns result geometries as meshes ready for further design and manufacturing. To support different workflows, the API outputs multiple geometry types:

• A massless single-surface geometry for sheet simulations or single-pass slicing.
• A thickened solid surface suitable for voxel-based simulation and additive manufacturing.
• Two complementary solids representing the hollow labyrinths for fluid flow simulations.

Achieve your design goals with intuitive field controls and flexible modifiers — combine and adjust them exactly as you wish. Spherene’s design tools are built around design intent, enabling rapid iteration cycles and drastically reducing engineering time. Instead of wrestling with complex formulas or endless manual tweaks, you focus on what matters: defining performance and functional requirements.

In order to create a spherene, you only need to specify three things:

• an Envelope — the geometry that defines the space inside which it will be generated — and at least
• one value for the Density, Thickness, and Surface Bias fields.

From these simple inputs, Spherene’s algorithmic engine computes the optimal minimal surface, conformal to your geometry and ready for use.

Forget gyroids, Boolean operations, and trimming unit cells. Spherene’s Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS) are generated in a single step — isotropic by nature, inherently surface-conformal, and optimized for manufacturability. Surfaces flow smoothly with open channels for effortless depowdering and largely support-free printing.

Density and thickness adapt automatically to loads and materials, turning ordinary metals, polymers, or ceramics into high-performance metamaterials.

The result is not just faster design cycles, but measurable ROI across industries: faster mold cooling in footwear, lighter aerospace brackets for fuel savings, porous implants for improved bone integration, and optimized heat exchangers for industrial efficiency.

Well, almost everything. The only thing left is your intent — you still decide what you want to achieve. With Spherene ADMS, the pathway from vision to print-ready geometry is shorter, smarter, and more powerful than ever before.

ESA / SPHERENE OSIP “OPEN CHANNEL EARLY TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT” EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — KEY OUTCOMES (CONT. NO. 4000132632/20/NL/GLC)

Read The original report from ESA and watch the video with the test performed.

Key Findings from the ESA Report

• Demonstrated Toolchain & Aerospace Use Case

  Spherene’s ADMS toolchain was applied to a representative aerospace bracket — a three-legged satellite support — under realistic boundary conditions and loads. Simulations included thermal stress, vibration testing, and printability assessments, proving the feasibility of ADMS in demanding aerospace environments.

• Support-Free Printability

  The study demonstrated dynamic growth to boundaries and support-free printability in various materials. This validates that ADMS structures can be manufactured with little to no supports, simplifying post-processing and lowering production costs.

• Performance vs. TPMS

  The report contrasted the organic density gradients of ADMS with the uniform density of gyroids. ADMS showed superior adaptability in distributing loads and optimizing structural performance, achieving better alignment between geometry and functional requirements.
• Simulation & Validation
  Thermal stress simulations and vibration tests, including measured vs. simulated frequency response in the Z-axis, confirmed strong correlation between model and reality. High-fidelity print simulation reinforced the manufacturability and reliability of ADMS designs.

• Material Versatility & Boundary Conformance

  ADMS was shown to dynamically grow to fit envelope boundaries while accommodating various materials. This underlines the versatility of the technology and its ability to respect even complex geometrical constraints.
  
  

Strategic Implications for Spherene

• Validation of Isotropy & Adaptability

  ADMS adapts intelligently to geometry and load cases, reinforcing mechanical performance in real-world applications.

• Support-Free Manufacturability

  Support-free printability and smooth depowdering reduce waste, machine time, and post-processing — lowering cost and risk.

• Credible Proof Case in Aerospace

  Demonstrating performance in a space-grade bracket provides a marquee case study and strengthens Spherene’s credibility in high-barrier markets.

• Simulation to Reality Correlation

  Proven consistency between simulations and physical tests builds confidence with partners, customers, and regulators.

• Material & Geometry Flexibility

  Compatibility with multiple materials and complex envelopes supports Spherene’s USP: transforming any material into a metamaterial.
  
  

Conclusion

The ESA/OSIP study confirms that Spherene’s ADMS delivers on its promises. It is not just a theoretical innovation, but a validated technology that has proven:

• Adaptivity to shape and load

• Manufacturability with support-free, boundary-aware designs

• Reliable correlation between simulation and reality

• Versatility across materials and geometries

These outcomes reinforce Spherene’s position in markets such as aerospace, medical, and high-performance manufacturing — where reliability, certification, and efficiency are critical, and where ADMS unlocks new levels of performance while reducing waste and complexity.

THE PAST:
Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) were well-suited for distributing and dispersing loads, making them a popular choice for designing lightweight, load-bearing components. The rise of metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) brought a paradigm shift in spacecraft production: complex, multifunctional parts became cheaper and more effective than simple assemblies. In this context, TPMS gained traction — typically used as infill structures built from cubic unit cells, sometimes distorted to fit bounding geometries.

THE NOW AND NEXT:
We advanced the method further and introduced Adaptive Density Minimal Surfaces (ADMS). By locally adapting the generating parameters to inputs such as load, shape, or scale, ADMS add configurability — a defining advantage over conventional TPMS.

With ADMS, designers can create AM parts optimized for application requirements such as special load cases, unique geometry, weight constraint, multi-functions in one part, and so on. These parts achieve an exceptional weight-to-performance ratio, minimize material usage, reduce build time and cost, and even enable support-free SLM metal printing, cutting post-processing effort dramatically. ADMS structures also form two interleaved labyrinths, unlocking applications in insulation, storage, and heat exchange.

For example, a lightweight satellite chassis can be designed not only for stiffness and vibration attenuation but also with an inherent dual-chamber system. This embedded thermal piping helps mitigate stresses caused by temperature gradients between sunlit and shadowed regions of the spacecraft.

Spherene’s vision is to evolve the ADMS configurator into a versatile design tool that accelerates industrial design workflows and delivers intelligent interior geometry optimized for diverse user applications.