Shellular Metamaterial Design via Compact Electric Potential Parametrization

TL;DR

This paper presents a fast, expressive design space for shellular metamaterials, enabling real-time evaluation and inverse design for structures with diverse geometries and mechanical properties, validated through manufacturing prototypes.

Contribution

It introduces a compact parametrization and GPU-based homogenization pipeline for shellular metamaterials, facilitating rapid exploration and optimization of complex structures.

Findings

Evaluation of structures in under 20 ms

Structures achieve up to 91.86% of theoretical bounds

Prototypes confirm manufacturability via additive manufacturing

Abstract

We introduce a compact yet highly expressive design space for shellular metamaterials. By employing only a few dozen degrees of freedom, this design space represents geometries ranging from simple planar configurations to complex triply periodic minimal surfaces. Coupled with this representation, we develop an efficient GPU-based homogenization pipeline that evaluates the structure in under 20 ms and computes the corresponding effective elastic tensor in near-real-time (0.5 s). The high speed of this evaluation facilitates an exhaustive exploration of the design space and supports an inverse-design scheme that tailors the shellular structure to specific macroscopic target property. Structures derived through this approach exhibit not only geometric diversity but also a wide spectrum of mechanical responses, covering a broad range of material properties. Moreover, they achieve up to 91.86% of theoretical upper bounds, a level of performance comparable to state-of-the-art shellular structures with low solid volume. Finally, our prototypes, fabricated via additive manufacturing, confirm the practical manufacturability of these designs, underscoring their potential for real-world engineering applications.