Authors: Hang Z Yu Samuel R Cross Christopher A Schuh
Publish Date: 2017/01/11
Volume: 52, Issue: 8, Pages: 4288-4298
Abstract
As multimaterial additive manufacturing technologies mature a new opportunity for materials science and engineering emerges between the scale of the microstructure and the scale of an engineering component Here we explore the problem of “mesostructure optimization” the computational identification of preferred pointtopoint distributions of material structure and properties We illustrate the opportunity with two simple example problems for 1D and 2D mesostructure optimization respectively namely 1 a functionally graded cylinder that is computationally optimized to redistribute the Hertzian contact stress fields and 2 a thin plate made of digital materials computationally designed to simultaneously maximize bending resistance and minimize total weight The mechanical performance of materials in these two problems is significantly improved as compared to any monolithicmaterial counterpart including a topologyoptimized monolith in case 2 These results point to new opportunities for multiobjective performance enhancement in materials
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