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IMAGE: Glaucio Paulino and Emily Sanders, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, are co-authors on the paper. view more
Credit: Candler Hobbs, Georgia Tech
A mollusk and shrimp are two unlikely marine animals that are playing a very important role in engineering. The bodies of both animals illustrate how natural features, like the structures of their bones and shells, can be borrowed to enhance the performance of engineered structures and materials, like bridges and airplanes. This phenomenon, known as biomimetics, is helping advance structural topology research, where the microscale features found in natural systems are being mimicked.
In a recent paper published by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), a new approach to structural topology optimization is outlined that unifies both design and manufacturing to create novel microstructures, with potential applications ranging
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bar is the manufactured bar diameter corresponding, in this case, to unit cells with edge length of 1.5 mm. In design, we model half of the domain and impose symmetry boundary conditions along the
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3 plane. Printed cantilevers are 14.5 cm tall. Scale bars, 1.5 mm. Photo credit: Emily D. Sanders, Georgia Institute of Technology.
To demonstrate that the proposed multimicrostructure-embedding scheme is capable of generating smooth, well-connected transitions between microstructures composed of unit cells with similar or dissimilar geometries that may or may not have clear connectivity, we design and manufacture the cantilever beam considering three different combinations of two microstructural materials. In Fig. 1A, we consider materials composed of octahedron unit cells with different bar diameters. In Fig. 1B, we consider a simple cubic and a truncated octahedron unit cell. In Fig. 1C, we consider a face-
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