Multi-physics inverse homogenization for the design of innovative cellular materials: application to thermo-mechanical problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-physics inverse homogenization algorithm for designing lightweight cellular materials with tailored thermo-mechanical properties, producing innovative unit cell layouts with sharp contours and superior performance.

Contribution

It generalizes the microSIMPATY algorithm to a multi-physics framework, enabling the design of complex cellular structures with combined thermal and mechanical functionalities.

Findings

Designed cellular materials outperform existing solutions in thermo-mechanical tests.

Resulting layouts have non-standard topologies with sharp contours.

The method effectively integrates multi-physics requirements into material design.

Abstract

We present a new algorithm to design lightweight cellular materials with required properties in a multi-physics context. In particular, we focus on a thermo-mechanical setting, by promoting the design of unit cells characterized both by an isotropic and an anisotropic behaviour with respect to mechanical and thermal requirements. The proposed procedure generalizes microSIMPATY algorithm to a multi-physics framework, by preserving all the good properties of the reference design methodology. The resulting layouts exhibit non-standard topologies and are characterized by very sharp contours, thus limiting the post-processing before manufacturing. The new cellular materials are compared with the state-of-art in engineering practice in terms of thermo-mechanical properties, thus highlighting the good performance of the new layouts which, in some cases, outperform the consolidated choices.