Architectured and additively manufactured materials with design by topology optimization

One of the paradigms to fill the white space (gap) in material property maps (Ashby charts) is to develop architectured materials opening up new opportunities for innovation.

Such gap is broadly filled with metamaterials, a family of artificial materials with rationally designed architecture providing extraordinary effective properties compared with their nature counterparts. These man-made materials are obtained via the AM-Engineering Cycle. The proper unification and maturity of this cycle stages (design-manufacturing-inspection) is an ultimate goal.

This proposal starts such cycle with design by TO due to its natural synergy with AM, i.e., the freedom that TO presents is well explored by AM (and vice-versa). Particularly, one aims designing anepectic metamaterials exhibiting both NPR and NTE, i.e. double negative index metamaterials, impacting on the biomedical (e.g. stents or surgical hernia meshes) and mechanical (e.g. sensors, actuators, energy absorbers) fields. This implies here performing TO in multi-material/objective/physics problems which still lacks maturity in the field and thus justifies advancing the state-of-the-art.